Determinator / Video Games

"But instead of scurrying away like any creature with a basic instinct to survive, you just kept coming back. Again... and again... and again."

— Ghirahim, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

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A-C

• Many RPGs have an ability or statistic called "guts" that allows heroes who should by rights be dead/unconscious to stay up on 1HP through sheer willpower. See Last Chance Hit Point for examples.
• Armageddon (MUD) turns the entire dwarven race into a collective bunch of determinators. In the course of growing up, every dwarf acquires a focus. A focus is, essentially, an extremely difficult goal which will tend to requiring a lifetime of effort, struggle and work to acquire/maintain. In the event that a dwarf does somehow manage to complete his focus, they will simply set themselves a new one, one often related to the first, and usually much tougher and difficult still. There is nothing at all for a dwarf to stop in doing their focus; a dwarf will completely consider any detail that might throw them off course and will not stop until the outcome of said focus is assured and finalised completely.
• In Armello, Horace is a badger clad in heavy plate armor. He's as hard to stop as this implies; his play style revolves around setting a destination and brutalizing or shrugging off anything or anyone that tries to stop him from reaching it. As a former knight, the King's Guard stand aside for him. He also has the health and combat stats to overrun anyone else who gets in his way and endure any perils he suffers on his path. Add a magical ring that allows him to travel through mountains as though they were plains, and very little can stand in his way.
• The Hashashin from Assassin's Creed. With all of the conspiracy theories and rewritten history strewn throughout the two games, only one thing is left absolutely certain: if Al-Mualim sends Altaïr after you, there is a 100% probability that you are going to die.
  • Altaïr may very well go straight to Implacable Man status.
  • You also do not want to kill most of Ezio's family, if you don't want your entire conspiracy to be ground to dust by a single man, whose Roaring Rampage of Revenge ends with administering a Curb-Stomp Battle to the Pope.
  • Note that Ezio begins his Roaring Rampage of Revenge at age seventeen.
  • In Revelations, Ezio is 55 years old, has been fighting and training most of his life, and is the Mentor of the Assassin Brotherhood. One would think that he would be slowing down in his old age. But as the intro movie shows, he not only hasn't slowed down, he literally hasn't missed a beat. The only reason he's defeated by the Templar soldiers is because he catches a glimpse of Altair in the melee, which distracts him just long enough. And then, after he's been defeated and is about to be hung...well, let's just say that all he's doing is waiting for the right moment to make his move, which is just as the noose is tightened around his neck.
  • In Assassin's Creed 3, Connor is just as much this as Altair and Ezio. He is betrayed by Washington and the Patriots after all the help he gave them, is shellshocked by cannons that he himself arranged to be fired at the fort he was going into, is nearly strangled to death by his own father, and ends up being impaled by a broken beam in a burning ship. When Charles Lee Lampshades this and asks why he goes on, Connor replies "Because no one else will" and shoots him, before proceeding to hunt him down across the colonies.
• Asura from Asura's Wrath is possibly the most over the top of the examples shown so far. Nothing (And we mean nothing) can stop him from seeking his revenge on his traitorous former comrades. Asura straight up dies multiple times during the game, and just keeps coming back. Returning from the dead faster each time they send him there.
• Baldur's Gate:
  • Jon Irenicus of Shadows of Amn has one thing on his mind: the power he was denied when the Seldarine prevented him from becoming a god. If he has to rip the souls from living men and women, temporarily surrender to the authorities just so their guard is down and he can break out, work with thieves and vampires, make pacts with sworn foes of his people, pretend to be a humble servant, slaughter his kin or destroy entire cities to attain it, he will. You have to fight him no less than three times in the game, killing him twice. And after all that, after following him to Hell and kicking his astral butt there, the ending cutscene shows his soul incarnating again and attempting to fight off a horde of gibbering demons with his bare hands. He's also more than willful to show that he "cannot be caged", "you will all suffer" and that "your only purpose is to die by my hand" to anybody.
  • Sarevok, the Big Bad from the first game. He appears in the Very Definitely Final Dungeon in Shadows of Amn, and after dying there he appears to the player in Throne Of Bhaal, the final installment, having pulled himself back into a ghostly existence through sheer willpower in order to bargain his (vital) knowledge for the piece of the player's soul he needs to resurrect himself.
    Sarevok: Hahahahaaaa! I live! Flesh and blood and bone! I swore I would scratch and crawl my way back into the world of the living... and I have done it!
  • The main character him/herself. When fighting Irenicus, even if left rotting without a soul, he/she won't surrender at all, ultimately following the Big Bad into Hell itself in order to take back his/her soul.
• Gruntilda from Banjo-Kazooie. She gets pecked and shot with eggs several times, gets slammed by a high-powered jinjo ten times, falls off her tower making a hole in the ground, gets hit again when a huge rock slams down on the hole...and still struggles to get the boulder off. In the sequel, she's freed after having spent two years in the hole, having been reduced to a skeleton, but immediately blows up the protagonist's house. And that's just at the beginning of the second game. At the end of Banjo-Tooie, she is reduced to a skull. And proceeded to spend the next eight years rolling and hopping across the country solely to take revenge on Banjo and Kazooie. She's prepared to fight them even without any discernible means of doing so before L.O.G. turns up.
• The Kid from Bastion. Even before he found himself thrust into an epic struggle to rebuild the world, he volunteered for two tours of duty on the Rippling Walls, a defensive barrier where life was so rough and dangerous that no one in the history of Caelondia had ever volunteered for a second tour. Afterward, he hurls himself into saving the world, despite the fact that he is alone, vastly outnumbered by monsters and beasts and the heavily-armed remnants of the Ura, and armed with only scrounged weapons, techniques detailed in old, dusty tomes, and a whole lot of alcohol. It culminates at the end of the game, where the kid finds Zulf, a former friend-turned-instigator of the Ura's attack on the Bastion, who is being beaten by his fellow Ura for convincing them to attack the Bastion and losing so many lives fighting the Kid. If the Kid chooses to save Zulf, he picks him up and slings him over his back, abandoning the all-powerful Battering Ram, and walks through the assembled Ura army, taking wave after wave of crossbow bolts and pressing on. Eventually, the Ura are so amazed and impressed by his unwavering resolve that they stop attacking and stand aside...save for one jackass who opens fire on the Kid near the end, and is immediately cut down by his commander.
• Betrayal at Krondor gives us Gorath, a moredhel (dark elf) chieftain who seeks to save his race from further destruction in another war they would start and ultimately shape them into "more than savages". And he flinches at nothing in his quest to do so. Surrender himself as a messenger to the humans his people have waged bloody war against for centuries, with his own kind branding him traitor and no reason to expect anything better than torture and execution at the hands of those he seeks help from? No problem. Go to Elvandar, the home of the eledhel, where a moredhel could expect to be killed on sight, or, as one of the Returning ones, cease to be moredhel and instead be enlisted into the eledhel ranks, when even travelling there causes him physical agony? Sure. Let himself be teleported blindly to the location of the most powerful magician on two worlds currently in need of a rescue? Go ahead. Touch a powerful relic of the Valheru — the force he fears most for the madness it has caused his people — in an effort to stop the Valheru spirits from escaping, ultimately at the cost of his own life? A Determinator to the end.
• BlazBlue's protagonist Ragna the Bloodedge. If there is one thing he's good at, it's getting back up and continuing to fight after nearly every time he's knocked down. This has happened multiple times across the entire franchise. That's not even getting into the emotional strain put on him...
  • Hakumen spent ninety years of utter isolation in the Boundary — the same place that drove Lotte Carmine mad and turned him into the Eldritch Abomination we know as Arakune — and retained his sanity through sheer force of will.
  • In a similar vein, Makoto was able to go through the Boundary twice and emerged with no physical or psychological damage both times, all through Heroic Willpower and her loyalty to Noel and Tsubaki. Having such a cheery and compassionate personality considering her sucktastic childhood requires exactly that.
  • Jin Kisaragi in his Story Mode is a definite example, where he fights several ludicrously powerful people and holds his own despite being badly injured. Considering Hakumen is his extracontinuual incarnation, it makes perfect sense.
  • Also Litchi Faye-Ling. There's nothing stopping her from attempting to find the cure both for Arakune and her, be it the Boundary's memory erosion, nearly everyone else's suggestions that it's a lost cause or even desperate decisions to join Team Evil. This is also probably why similar to Makoto and Hakumen, she didn't devolve into a puddle yet (though she's only getting slow symptoms simply by being a mere human).
  • Naoto Kurogane from the Bloodedge novels and introduced to the games in Central Fiction. He will never give up, even if the odds are stacked horribly against him. This fact combined with his near limitless Healing Factor makes him nigh-impossible to stop.
• Shu from Blue Dragon is this, through a combination of youthful exuberance and steadfast...um...determination to protect those he cares about.
• This is Hildie's defining trait in Bonfire, and the reason she is The Hero. While other heroes can lose hope and go into a 10-Minute Retirement, Hildie will never abandon the quest. Her "alone" barks are also notably more courageous and optimistic than other heroes', showing she refuses to give up even when seemingly all hope is lost.
• During the third DLC of Borderlands 2 you have Professor Nakayama refer to your character as a "Walking Apocalypse", and it's not hard to see why. Your character is practically unstoppable, will do whatever s/he has to to get new loot and move forward, and will kill alien gods and corrupt CEOs for personal justifications. Absolutely nothing will stop a Vault Hunter from their prize.
• From Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,
  • Captain Price. "The healthy human mind doesn't wake up in the morning thinking this is its last day on Earth. But I think that's a luxury. Not a curse. To know you're close to the end is a kind of freedom. Good time to take...inventory. Outgunned. Outnumbered. Out of our minds. On a suicide mission. But the sand and the rocks here, stained with thousands of years of warfare...They will remember us. For this. Because out of all our vast array of nightmares, this is the one we choose for ourselves. We go forward like a breath exhaled from the Earth. With vigor in our hearts and one goal in sight: We. Will. Kill him."
  • Soap qualifies as well. What do you do when you just went over a waterfall in an inflatable raft after holding it still so Captain Price could shoot the pilot of a helicopter? You drag yourself out of the water to check if Shepherd's dead. What do you do when you've been stabbed in the chest and Captain Price is apparently beating the tar out of Shepherd? Go crawl towards the gun Shepherd dropped. And finally, when you're laying on the ground, bleeding out from the knife wound and watching Shepherd beating Price into submission, what do you do? You pull the knife out of your chest and throw it at Shepherd, finally killing him.
  • Why don't we just say that all the main characters of Call of Duty series are an entire army of Determinators, ready to defend freedom and democracy against everything from Germans, Italians, French Nazis and Japanese to Islamic terrorists and Russian ultranationalists. Doyle, the playable British character from United Offensive and Call of Duty 3, was probably the Determinator of COD, until Soap took over.
• Once the titular detective from the Carol Reed Mysteries has set her mind to solve a case, she won't stop until the mystery is unraveled. In one game, she even forgets the date with her boyfriend on Midsummer's Eve she's been looking forward to for weeks because she's so wrapped up in a case.
• The concept is explored in Celeste with Madeline, who's stuck in a depressive rut and decides to go climb Mt. Celeste, even admitting herself that it's an extreme solution. Despite stubbornly ignoring everyone's advice to turn around and go home, she's still haunted by self-doubt over whether she can even do it, to the point that the Eldritch Location properties of the mountain create a physical manifestation of her fears and self-doubt that sabotages her the whole way while claiming that she's doing what's best for her. Granny eventually remarks that she started thinking Madeline would get all the way to the top out of sheer spite, and after finally making amends with her Enemy Without after she was knocked off of the mountain by her, the two of them team up and scale the entire peak in less than a day.
• In Chaos Rings Omega, Olgar/Dante arrives in time to rescue his son-in-law Vieg (soon to become Olgar) from Yorath. He immediately gets hit by what should be an instant-kill, but then continues in a scripted battle where Olgar can never lose his last hit point. And then, when all reason suggests that Olgar, who just defeated someone who could defeat the Qualia, should be deader than dead, saves Vahti and her child Ohm by jumping into LAVA. He walks through it for what seems like hours, telling Vieg to take over protecting the family from him. Finally, when he carefully lays his daughter and grandson next to the still nearly conscious Vieg, he finally sinks into the lava. Apparently willpower keeps your legs from being burned off.
• Crono of Chrono Trigger is pretty determined to protect his friends. "What's that, ancient evil? You've kicked my ass without even blinking and now you think you've won? Well, I'm not done yet!" (Then he's done.)
  • Magus is also a very good example. He survived in a (to him) post apocalyptic world, showering warfare on the world, all to find a way to kill the monster that ruined his life. His most famous quote embodies this trope:
    Magus: If history is to change, let it change! If the world is to be destroyed, so be it! If my fate is to be destroyed... I must simply laugh!!
    I'm coming, Lavos!
  • Ayla is this trope to a T, in fact it's her whole life's philosophy and probably why there's a human race at all in the game world. Her most famous quote says it all:
    Ayla: Ayla alive, Ayla fight! Win, live. Lose, die. That rule. No can change rule.
• In Chzo Mythos, Trilby qualifies for this trope, to the point where he is lying mortally injured, waiting for himself to be sacrificed to summon the avatar of a godly being and he Still. Won't. Die. Even when he acknowledges that it was only "his own stubbornness keeping him alive" and knowing that, should the Tall Man have no living sacrifice he would not answer the summons, you (the player) actually have to give Trilby the command to die. But then the ceremony still goes on, it just turns out that the Tall Man isn't picky with who he takes, instead absconding with the would-be sacrificer.
  • Subverted in 6 Days A Sacrifice, wherein we find clones of Trilby who are close enough to qualify as the real deal as far as Chzo / DeFoe / The Tall Man cares. Said clones are easily brainwashed, to the point where they serve as antagonists for half of the game. At the end Trilby (clone?) is seen quivering in terror inside of Chzo, cursed to the kind of immortal suffering that made the Tall Man into the Tall Man in the first place. Patently un-Determinator-like behavior all around.
• The Willpower defense powerset in City of Heroes is described as nothing supernatural, unlike Invulnerability, Regeneration, Fire/Ice/Stone Armor, and the like; the character's defenses stem entirely from the fact that even though "bullets don't bounce off of you, and if you are cut, you bleed," the character is "tough, grizzled and strong willed. It takes more than a little cut to keep you down!" Some examples of powers within this set are High Pain Tolerance, Mind Over Body, and Indomitable Will; the 11th-Hour Superpower is called Strength of Will. Ironically, this is considered one of the better defense sets in the game, and is a favorite of Natural-origin Badass Normals.
• Clive Barker's Undying: Let's face it: Patrick pretty much IS this trope. Let's see here: Survive World War I? Check. Survive at least decades of conflict with Otto Keisinger? Check. Get through Irish customs unnoticed in order to fulfill a life debt? Check. Fight through wave after wave of unspeakable abominations that have racked up quite the kill count? Check. Handle the Artifact of Doom with fairly marginal damage? Check. Kill off the undead and superhuman Covenant siblings one by one? Check. Go into HELL to defeat Keisinger? Check. Survive Jeremiah's betrayal? Check. Take down the Eldritch Abomination that helped cause this godforsaken train wreck in the first place? Check. Basically, by the end, he is pretty much surviving more-or-less because it seems like he can't bloody DIE.
• There is a saying about the Silencers of the Crusader series: "Silencers get the job done." They might not survive, but they will get the job done.
• Alcatraz in Crysis 2. He essentially became a corpse at the start of the game (and you'll get a more comprehensive explanation why a bit into the game), only kept alive by the Nanosuit Prophet puts on him. And even after that, he goes through a lot more punishment that should have put him down even if that suit was on Maximum Armor. One of the more significant injuries he sustains is, after escaping the Nexus, he gets knocked out when a car falls on his head, and then he drifts down river until he wakes up to Gould and Tara Strickland and just gets into an IFV and soldiers on.
• In Cuphead, every boss you fight has their immortal soul on the line. Therefore, many of them will keep coming long after you've beaten them down:
  • Wally Warbles still guns for you even when featherless and being carted by nurses in a stretcher.
  • Cala Maria keeps fighting even when she's been reduced to a floating head.
  • But the most determined is probably Goopy Le Grande, who apparently gets killed in the second phase of his fight, before his possessed gravestone comes back to try and crush you.

D-F

• Prince Ross is this in the seventh Dark Parables game. He's engaged to Princess Rapunzel, but she's been lost for at least a few hundred years since the country of her birth collapsed under magical devastation. He doesn't care how long it takes, though - he will get in there and he will find her and he will get her back. Admittedly, this has had a less than salutary effect on his disposition by the time of the game (being a Fiery Redhead compounds it), but he's still a good person.
• Dark Souls: Pretty much the whole game is an example of this trope. You will get crushed, hacked, beaten, roasted, poisoned, dropped down bottomless pits, eaten by hungry treasure chests and wanted dead by every single living thing in the game. It's strongly implied that even your friends will eventually turn insane and try to kill you (and most of them do). Despite this, your character will keep pushing on and eventually kill every single badass in the game; some of which are essential gods, all in an attempt to try and remove the curse that has everybody going feral in the first place. By the end of it all, it's not only the character that's a determinator, it's the player as well. In fact, the lore states your character starts Hollowing once they stop being this, possibly at the point when the player Rage Quits the game from the Nintendo Hard gameplay.
  • One of the bosses in Dark Souls II is the Pursuer, a marauding undead slayer who, per his boss soul description, "will not rest until his target is slain". He backs this up by refusing to leave you alone, even after you kill him in his boss fight — particularly in Scholar of the First Sin, where he will dog your steps throughout the game, popping up again and again and again to take a swing at you with his ultra greatsword.
  • Dark Souls III's expansion The Ringed City has an NPC example in Patches. That's right, the greasy trickster who kicks people into pits to loot their corpses for things to sell, manages to survive from the first game all the way to the end of time without ever going completely Hollow. To go completely Hollow an Undead must lose all sense of purpose in life and cross the Despair Event Horizon. Well, Patches found his purpose (screwing people over) and he stuck to it, and it definitely paid off for him. It's highly likely that the only reason he even started going Hollow at all by the time of The Ringed City is because he simply ran out of people to screw over, since they all died or went Hollow before he did.
  • Another example from The Ringed City: Slave Knight Gael. By the time you meet him, the undead knight has already been through countless trials and tribulations, with his gear item descriptions noting that his kind were used as Cannon Fodder in the world's deadliest wars, and were never relieved of their service. He uses the Way of White Corona miracle, described to be from "when the imprints left by the gods were still deep," which, at this point in the series' timeline, would have been countless millennia ago. And he's been living this whole time without going Hollow at all. By the time you find him, he's still fully devoted to his purpose: gather the flame and the blood of the Dark Soul for his niece, in order to create a new Painted World for the forlorn of the dying worlds. Like Patches, he survives to the end of time at the Ringed City, still not hollowed; but unlike Patches, he braves every single danger of the city alone and makes his way to the throne of the Pygmies to consume their blood. This makes him a vessel for the Dark Soul itself. You find him alone in the world, After the End, eons after everyone he ever knew has died... and he's still not hollow. That happens halfway through the mad knight's subsequent boss fight; when he confirms that consuming the Pygmies' blood transferred the Dark Soul to him, and with the knowledge that you will bring the Dark Soul back to his Lady in his stead, his purpose is finally fulfilled. His soul's description states that he knew that even if he found it, the Dark Soul would likely ruin him and that his chances of a safe return were slim, but Gael marched on regardless and achieved his aim, ensuring that life would survive in the new world, despite him not being around to see it and no one knowing that he was to thank for it.
• Isaac Clarke from Dead Space. He has fought an entire Planet Cracker vessel's worth of space zombies (and their Hive Mind) while doing more than the repairs he was originally sent for, as well as being roped into a Gambit Pileup between The Mole and an artificial Artifact of Doom, coming out on top of it all, while being supposedly insane, all because he wanted to find his girlfriend. And during the scene where his girlfriend turns out to have been Dead All Along, Isaac's Heroic BSoD lasts all of five seconds, then he gets back to work. And by work I mean taking out giant freaking monsters with mining tools.
  • Even more so in the sequel. After surviving the first game Isaac gets to spend a few years in an insane asylum. Then after being woken up to the sound of screams and blaring alarms, has his supposed rescuer killed and turned into a necromorph right in front of him. What does Isaac do? He HEADBUTTS that necromorph without hesitation and escapes, all while IN A STRAIGHT-JACKET.
• Connor from Detroit: Become Human can count as this, especially if he remains a machine. Depending on the player’s actions, he can certainly take advantage of the fact that Cyberlife will provide a new Connor and upload his memories to it in the case that he dies; he just keeps coming back, all for the sake of completing his mission and eliminating the deviant revolution.
• Adell from Disgaea 2 takes this to the point where it actually grants him in-game bonuses: he deals extra damage against enemies with a higher level than himself.
  • Valvatorez once tried to get a mute robot Prinny to use his proper Verbal Tic for ten straight hours. This is completely normal behavior for him.
    • He's perfectly willing to go against God itself to fulfill a promise.
  • Quite literally Zed's defining trait. Using Super Reincarnation, every time he dies, he comes back stronger. He started off as the weakest being out there, but by the time the story starts for the player, he has died tens of thousands of times to the same opponent but has finally reached the point where he can fight it evenly. His utter unwillingness to give up ever inspires his allies, and he even changes fate at one point just to prove a point.
• K.Rool, antagonist of the Donkey Kong series. Each boss fight with him requires him to take a massive amount of punishment before going down, and in the second game he survives being eaten by sharks.
  • In Donkey Kong 64, he's pummeled in the head by a cannon-launched gorilla, suffers some nasty-looking injuries to his foot, slips on several oversized bananas, has a bunch of light fixtures dropped on his head, and is finally beaten by the mother of all haymakers from the massive yet Lovable Coward Chunky. And he still doesn't stay down for more than a minute.
• In Don't Starve's Sequel Game Don't Starve Together, the Ancient Fuelweaver tells the survivors that they should just let themselves die for good, rather than face whatever the Big Bads have planned for them. Their answer is to beat the crap out of him.
• Doom:
  • Doomguy utterly refuses to go down without a fight, despite the fact that all hell has quite literally broken loose, and he is the only non-zombified person around for millions of miles. He proceeds to slaughter all the demons and zombies that are attacking him, then fights his way into Hell, kills everything there, and fights his way back out. And that's just the first game, as in the second he goes to Hell itself and ravages the demonic legion on his own.
  • In Doom 64, a powerful "mother" demon resurrects everything Doomguy had killed in his previous fights. His response? Eradicate anything between him and the Mother, kill her, and then stay in Hell to make sure the demons don't try anything like that ever again. The 2020 rerelease makes this even more badass by revealing that the Mother Demon's sister then tries to straight up kick him out of Hell, only Doomguy to quickly fight his way back in and kill the sister.
  • The backstory of Doom (2016) reveals that the Doom Slayer has spent untold eons wreaking havoc across Hell, with the only way the demons could stop him being to bring a temple down onto him and seal him into a sarcophagus. Then once things go haywire on Mars, the Sealed Badass in a Can gets opened and his first action is to maul the first enemy that gets within arm's reach.
  Slayer's Testament III: Unbreakable, incorruptible, unyielding, the Doom Slayer sought to end the dominion of the dark realm.
  • Doom Eternal confirms that the Slayer is indeed the original Doomguy, and puts great emphasis on his uncompromising determination, whether it be his rise through the ranks of the Night Sentinels against all odds, or his refusal to relent even just one bit from his age-old crusade against Hell, even if it brings down Heaven's wrath itself.
• The Warden, the player character of Dragon Age: Origins, is this in spades. Regardless of which of the six possible backgrounds is theirs, they overcome the circumstances and join La Résistance to try to stop the Fifth Blight from taking hold. When that doesn't work, they set about forming a new resistance to battle the forces of evil, which are coming at them from all sides. While Hawke and the Inquisitor have some Determinator qualities in their own right, it's hard to match that of their predecessor. At the time of Inquisition, if they weren't killed in the endgame of Origins, the Warden is off on a secret mission to try and save their fellow Grey Wardens from a slow and painful death, and the letter they may send to the Inquisitor suggests that they view this impossible task as merely inconvenient.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest IV: Torneko's always following a dream, and his zeal is often remarked on by his teammates.
  • Dragon Quest V:
    • Nothing the villains throw at the Hero (and they throw a lot:kidnapping his mother, killing his father and burning his corpse to ashes, making him a slave for ten years, kidnapping his wife, turning him into stone him and his wife...) causes him to stay down for very long.
    • Crispin manages to make it towards the end of the Engagement Challenge through his love for Nera alone. If he loses but Nera isn't chosen as the bride, he'll climb the volcano again just to prove himself.
• Caim, the protagonist of Drakengard, has it in for every single Imperial soldier and civilian. All of them. He will kill them all. No one will escape. Even his dragon mount, who detests all of humanity, asks him "Must you slaughter so many?" Not even The End of the World as We Know It keeps him from fulfilling his vengeance.
• Dwarf Fortress dwarves tend to stand out among other races for this. While goblins run the hell away when their leader falls, and elves and humans are quick to fold them when they see everything's going belly up, you seldom see a military dwarf run away from anything. Chop off their arms and they kick you, chop their legs too and they'll bite your face off, but they'll die in battle, even if it stops being so heroic and starts crossing over into stupid. And once the threat's gone, they'll gladly get back to work while missing half/all their limbs, or have a spinal injury in a game without wheelchairs, or went completely blind, or are dragging their intestines behind them. Or all of these, depending on how cruel the Random Number God/the player is to that particular dwarf.
  • Sometimes your dwarves will literally die of thirst or starvation endlessly trying to wrestle and strangle that nearly invincible but harmless pile of mangled up zombie...
• Dynasty Warriors 7 tragically deconstructs this term, especially for the Shu side. Jiang Wei becomes so obsessed with fulfilling his promise to Zhuge Liang that he kept attacking Jin despite failing everytime, draining the kingdom's resources needlessly and getting many soldiers die. His determination to fulfill the promise to Zhuge Liang is that big that he is unable to listen to anything else. When Liu Shan eventually surrenders to save the people of Shu from the Hopeless War he created, Jiang Wei still refused to go down quietly and joins up with Zhong Hui for a chance to fulfill that promise, resulting his death.
• By the end of Earth Defense Force 2025, the EDF is basically defeated. Their HQ has been found and destroyed multiple times, most of the planet is trapped beneath World Eaters, and they've already issued instructions to the civilian populace to begin a guerrilla fight against the Ravagers. The player's squad, which has been fighting through increasingly insurmountable odds as the game progresses, is part of the EDF's final, desperate assault on the 'Brain' controlling the invasion. As the attack fails and the last hope of the planet fades, the squad's status as a group of Determinators is revealed and immediately lampshaded:
  Tactics: Attack units almost destroyed.
  HQ: We couldn't match their strength...
  Tactics: No, not yet. Someone is still fighting. It's the Storm Team!
  HQ: Are they immortal or something?
• Elden Ring:
  • As with many other games, the player character. As with previous Soulslike games, you will have to traverse a continent, fight hundreds of monsters, and die in every creative way known to the Lands Between in order to become Elden Lord.
  • Sir Gideon Ofnir is one of the few ancient Tarnished to still seek to mend the Elden Ring, when pretty much all of his contemporaries and most new arrivals give up and go do their own thing. Dickish though he may be, you've got to admire his dedication. Which makes it all the more of a Wham Episode when he sees something inside the Erdtree that breaks his will to go on, resulting in him fighting you as a boss.
  • The crowning example is probably Malenia, Blade of Miquella. She has suffered from Scarlet Rot for her entire life, and still found the will to become an unbeaten warrior and general in support of her brother Miquella. Even her healing in her boss fight is described as Malenia willing herself to continue the fight just a little bit longer whenever she lands a hit. Taking a few too many hits against her can lead to Malenia determinating herself from being a few hits away from death to full health- and her health bar is substantial.
• The guards from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion fit this trope perfectly. Because they are always ten levels higher then the player, they can take a beating that would slaughter an entire family of bears. They will chase you across the entire country, through rivers and over mountains, passing bandit camps and hell gates swarming with demons, until they finally manage to corner you and perforate every one of your internal organs, because you touched a loaf of bread. Not stole, touched.
  • The Dunmer of Morrowind, and particularly those of House Redoran and House Indoril, are known for this attitude. When the Tribunal made peace with the Empire, many Indoril nobles killed themselves rather than suffer the indignity, and House Redoran managed to hold out north of Mournhold against the Hist-powered Argonian army of the An-Xileel even after their living gods died/vanished and a falling moon destroyed half their province. Even simply surviving in Morrowind probably qualifies them.
  • As shown in this video, never, EVER sit in Janus Hassildor's throne!
• El Paso, Elsewhere: A reoccuring motif. James Savage, an Occult Detective, goes Off the Wagon on painpills to square off against his vampire ex-girlfriend to save the world, knowing he'll likely die in the process. If the player dies during the game, the game over screen says "YOU KEEP GOING." Even when he is suffering clearly mortal wounds during the last half of the game, he does not relent. Draculae also gets a second wind during the final boss fight, fittingly with the text "SHE KEEPS GOING."
• All the player characters in Eternal Darkness are determined to drive back the threat of darkness from the ancients at all costs. Even if a character's Sanity Meter completely bottoms out and they're surrounded by the most horrific creatures threatening to tear them apart, they'll still keep going to the bitter end. Even in death, they warn their successors of the coming darkness and assist Alexandria fight the Final Boss.
• Fallen London: The player character has plentiful opportunities to act like this, pushing forward no matter what comes. But those PCs that particularly fulfill this are Seekers of Mr Eaten's Name. It doesn't matter how many times they have to die, get imprisoned, and have horrible brushes with the worst insanity. It doesn't matter how many friends and loved ones they must lose. It doesn't matter how much society thinks of you as a horrible abomination. It doesn't matter how damned hungry you get. Not even staining your soul horribly matters. You must find The Name.
• The Courier in Fallout: New Vegas. You take two bullets to the head and get buried alive in the opening cutscene, and revenge is the MacGuffin for the first part of the game. One quest has you confront the goons of the guy who shot you (however, you can actually help them get out of the mess they've made for themselves), and another has you confront the guy who pulled the trigger. Meanwhile, as you're doing this, you're bound to incur the wrath of at least one ill-tempered fighting force at some point in the game. Caesar even comments on your tenacity when you first meet him.
  • Similarly, in an unmarked quest in the game, a woman asks you to recover the body of her soldier husband from the Fiends. If you go past the troops holding the line a ways away from the body, then come back with little health left, they comment on how you're barely holding yourself together and wonder aloud why you did this for someone you don't even know. One of the possible responses is, "I made a promise to Private Morales." The soldier states that he'd hate to stand between you and your goals.
  • Another case of Determinator is Joshua Graham. Formerly the Legate of Caesar's Legion, he ended losing a battle and was sentenced to be killed for his failure. His sentence? Getting set on fire and thrown into the Grand Canyon. He not only survives, but crawls all the back to Northern Utah to his former home. That gets destroyed and he still survives. Even before that he was known for being unkillable, having been reported killed by snipers five times.This is also reflected in his stats, as he possesses a Damage Threshold of 50 while wearing only a suit of kevlar: Basically, this means that you need anti-tank weapons to even scratch him. The highest the Courier can get is 53; a process that involves implanting armour into your skin, replacing several body parts with robotics, and wearing Power Armour. Graham is hands down the best companion in the game and can complete his mission by himself.
• Final Fantasy:
  • The "Unsent" from Final Fantasy X are people who've died but still cling to existence through sheer willpower.
    • Special mention must go to three Unsent in the series; Shuyin (or the anger and despair thereof), Maechen (who literally forgot he was dead) and especially Auron, who made a promise to Braska to protect Yuna, and didn't let a piddly thing like a horrible death get in the way.
  • Similarly the Undying from Final Fantasy XIII are Cie'th who were so enraged with the fal'Cie who made them l'Cie that they keep going forever out of sheer hatred and rage, rather then eventually fossilizing as most Cie'th do.
  • Final Fantasy VIII has Seifer, who refuses to back down no matter how many times he gets his ass handed to him, even after it's been made clear to him that he's being manipulated and used by the Big Bad.
  • To balance his determination, there's Squall, who develops into an immense Determinator in the third disc of the game. When faced with the only possibility of saving Rinoa after she goes comatose being crossing an ocean-spanning bridge on foot, he doesn't even hesitate, and carries her on his back, on foot, all the way across. Empty, monster-filled wasteland stretching on for tens of miles ahead of him? He just keeps walking. Finding himself inside a technologically advanced and potentially hostile country? Keeps moving forward. Finds out the only way to save her is to go into space? No hesitation to go up there. When she gets hurled out into the voids of space and all he's got is a quarter of an hour's worth of oxygen in his suit, and no real guarantee he's going to save her if he can get to her, Squall hurls himself right out after her. Nothing, and we mean nothing is going to stop him from saving her.
  • Final Fantasy VIII also has the X-ATM092, better known as that giant frigging robot spider that chases you during the escape from Dollet. The damned thing pesters you the entire way, and the best most players can hope for is to either avoid fights altogether, or if cornered, fight it until they manage to flee the battle. Even avoiding the fights with it are a Guide Dang It!, and guess what else? You're TIMED.
  • Squall's status as a Determinator is taken even higher in Dissidia Final Fantasy, where his stubborness and determination are what keeps him going the most, forging his own path to end the conflict. He stubbornly refuses to work with anyone else, but also refuses to say why. Ultimecia believes it's because he can't trust people, but when he reveals that he trusts his friends completely, but would rather endanger himself to draw more enemies to him and save them the effort required, he quickly adds badass to the mix: he's trying to appear weak so he can destroy the enemies who think he's an easy target, so they won't go after his friends.
  • Galuf from Final Fantasy V does it too. Exdeath has the party held down with the Crystals, and when Galuf's granddaughter Krile swoops in and interrupts Exdeath yet again, he traps her in a burning ring of fire and slams her across the room a few times. All seems lost... until Galuf gets up, powers through the Crystal's force beam despite the fact that he'll make it shatter in doing so, goes into the ring of flame to rescue Krile, then, while aflame in more ways than one, charges at Exdeath and starts to go out fighting. Galuf's HP slowly decreases throughout the battle, but he won't stop kicking even at 0 - not even after being hit with successive use of the universe's three most powerful spells. Once Exdeath is defeated, though, Galuf finally collapses, and all the items and magic in the world won't bring him back.
  • Terra, from Final Fantasy VI. With the defeat of Kefka, the source of magic is gone and all Espers are vanishing from the world. This includes the Half-Esper Terra. Even knowing this, Terra chooses to enter her Trance form and lead the party out of the collapsing Tower. In the final stages of the ending, after the last shard of Magicite has vanished, Terra is still flying in order to lead the airship out, even as her power wanes and she begins to fall. In the end, The Falcon catches Terra, who has reverted to a human form. Not only does she manage to outlive every other Esper on sheer determination, she manages to completely survive, albeit as a human.
    • Along the same lines, Locke has his girlfriend put in to suspended animation until he can revive her with something he didn't even know existed at the time. He spends most of the game looking for it, up to and including the end of the world. Of course, when he does find it his girlfriend decides to die and fix the Esper so that the party can use it. Deciding who you are and what your purpose is for yourself is kind of a recurring theme in that game.
    • Let's not forget Sabin. After the first fight with Ultros in a river, Sabin unsuccessfully tries to finish the old octopus off and gets flung off the raft. Washed away by the rapids, he winds up miles off course. His response? Start walking. He walks... straight through an Imperial military base, across a savanna teeming with monsters, across an entire ocean along an underwater trench, and to the afterlife and back. After The End of the World as We Know It, we find that he apparently never gave up hero work, limited only by the fact that he's just one guy. The first we see of him, he's holding up an entire house by himself, for five minutes. After saving the kid inside, his response is to immediately join your party, no questions asked, having never lost his enthusiasm for busting Kefka in the jaw. He also utters the line representative of the entire main cast:
    Sabin: "Did you think a minor thing like the end of the world was gonna do me in?"
  • Cloud, from Final Fantasy VII, especially shown in his pre-game fight with Sephiroth. Sixteen years old, relatively untrained, no super powers or super strength, 5'7" tops (assuming he didn't grow between ages sixteen and twenty-one) and maybe 100 pounds soaking wet and fighting against The General — half a foot taller, probably at least twice his weight, genetically manipulated, trained from birth, insanely strong (and just insane). Cloud is knocked out while his town burns, but gives chase, eventually fighting Sephiroth, getting impaled by Sephiroth, and while still impaled on the man's blade and hoisted several feet in the air, somehow manages to get the upper hand and send Sephiroth flying into a pit of Mako. Not half bad!
    • Cloud being a Determinator is really his defining characteristic in the original game; when you look at his past he washed out of the SOLDIER program, indirectly causes Aerith's death, and spends a good portion of the second act of the game catatonic. Despite all of his failures, Cloud just keeps pushing through and refuses to give up.
  • Dying multiple times won't stop Sephiroth from trying to get even with him for that, so he counts, too.
  • The comparatively squishy lesser villain and corporate dictator Rufus might also count, given his unending pursuit of Sephiroth, only temporarily halted by explosions?
  • Zack Fair, in the Final Fantasy VII prequel Crisis Core, who escapes with Cloud after four years of horrible experimentation by the Mad Scientist Hojo. Zack steadfastly refuses to give up hope on or abandon the comatose Cloud, taking care of him for nearly a year, then has an epic Last Stand in which he battles a massive force from the Shinra army and manages to whittle them down to three troopers, in order to protect Cloud. And then, after being absolutely riddled with bullets, Zack still manages to give Cloud a Take Up My Sword speech before going out with a smile.
  • In one of the sidequests in Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning provides some monster drop items in exchange for food to heal her chocobo, the Angel of Valhalla to a guy labeled by the game as a "Hunter Hopeful." She then learns that he's planning to use the items as proof a successful hunt and is ready to write him off as a loser/cheater until she learns that A.) there's nothing in the rules that forbids this and B.) this is his 101st time taking the test. She feels that having failed that many times and still kept trying shows real determination and strength of character.
  • Determination is used as a negative character trait within Ashe in Final Fantasy XII. After losing her kingdom to The Empire, she becomes determined to get revenge and destroy them at all costs by using magical stones that have the power to completely level kingdoms. The rest of the party warn her throughout the story that she would easily get herself killed and possibly get her own kingdom destroyed when the empire responds with war. It also doesn't help that Ashe is being manipulated by the Occuria into obtaining dangerous artifacts to use against the empire. After going through some Character Development, Ashe realizes her original mindset was wrong and vows to find another way to defeat her enemies.
  • This is perhaps the greatest strength of the Warrior of Light from Final Fantasy XIV, moreso than their god-killing strength or famed invincibility. It doesn't matter whether they are up against someone far stronger than even them while barely able to walk due to their soul crumbling or are all alone at the edge of the universe against the embodiment of the universe's despair, they never let anything stop them.
• F.E.A.R.'s Alma is one of these, to a point where her sheer force of will allowed her to survive six days of being drowned with no life support (with one character commenting that she "simply refused to die") and her psychic presence continued to survive well after she finally died.
  • Unfortunately for Beckett, he found out that the only thing Alma wanted in the second game was to make him her man and have his baby.
  • The Replica troops are another variation on this, in that they will carry out whatever mission is given to them by their psychic commanders, immediately, without question, and without stopping until it has been completed, with no regard for their own lives. They'll go as far as suicidal frontal assaults to simply wound or slow down an opponent, to the point where they'll attack an enemy in a Humongous Mecha with rifles just to distract and delay it for a couple seconds.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • The animatronics will never, ever stop coming after you. Even in 2, when they've been half-dismantled and, by all rights, shouldn't be able to function at all, they keep coming. As it turns out, dying twice didn't even stop the Purple Man's victims from killing him.
  • Speaking of the Purple Man, he has been killing children since (maybe) 1973 until finally dying in 1993. But even that didn't stop him, as he's the main antagonist and only real threat in the third game, which likely takes place in 2023.

G-K

• Garry's Mod has "Nextbots", simple bots usually made of 2D images (frequently copied from Creepypasta) who possess a single-minded goal - find any living NPC or player around it and deliver a one-hit kill, with the uncanny ability to locate even the most well-hidden player, as well as breaking through welded/frozen items to get to them. Possibly the most famous is "Obunga", but numerous exist.
• Alwan in the Geneforge series. After surviving an attack on his school, his dedication to the Shapers results in him becoming the General in charge of defeating the Rebellion, personally leading a stealth attack on the Rebellion stronghold, somehow surviving massive injuries after the attack goes awry, and becoming the leader of a faction despite ending up like this◊.
• In Ghost Trick, Sissel and Missile both qualify. The latter especially, as his alternate timeline self decides to wait 10 years in order to set the plot into motion and save his beloved Kamila and Lynne.
  The Raven: Poor boy. He's confusing determination with desperation.^note freely translated
• Kratos of the God of War series. He's literally climbed out of Hell... four times. As he puts it: "If all of Olympus would deny me my vengeance, then all of Olympus must die!" And he said that quote after killing the Sisters of Fate, a fact that even Zeus declares impossible. The fact that his only clear motivation is the desire to kick the ass of anyone who screws with him just solidifies his status as an undiluted badass.
  • By the end of the third game, there is only one thing that has been successful at killing him: Himself.
  • Even then an after-credits scene reveals him gone from the scene of his death with a bloody trail showing that he crawled Away. And the fourth game outright confirms his survival, meaning even Kratos can't kill Kratos.
  • By the time of God of War (PS4), the only reason Kratos has to keep going in life is raising the son he sired after escaping to Norway after his rampage against the Greek pantheon. However, it doesn't last as soon as members of the Norse pantheon come knocking on his door. But as Balder, Magni, and Modi discover by the end of it, threatening the son of Kratos is a good way to get yourself killed earlier than you were prophesized to die, especially so for the latter two since they were supposed to survive Ragnarok.
• Guenevere: Lance, especially when it comes to Guen's safety.
• Duke Barradin from Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2.
  • In Guild Wars, The Duke of Ascalon survives the apocalyptic events of the Searing, which utterly destroys Ascalon. But he doesn't stop there. He takes his army of soldiers and elite guards, and pushes into Charr territory, the creatures who unleashed the Searing on him in the first place. Then, he captures and secures the ruins of Piken Square, and creates a small TOWN there. THEN, he has to deal with the death of his daughter, the lovely Lady Althea, the Prince of Ascalon's girlfriend and fiancee. It only strengthens his resolve.
    • Guild Wars 2 takes place hundreds of years after Guild Wars. When playing from the Charr perspective, your first enemies are — of all people — the Duke's elite guards in ghost form. And their boss? Duke Barradin's ghost. It takes a sizable force of NPCs and players to take him down. Even after you destroy his ghost, he possesses a giant statue, and then it's ROUND TWO. And when you manage to destroy that, IT'S ONLY TEMPORARY. The Charr leaders say he'll just reform in a few weeks and attack again. He's long dead and hundreds of years have passed, but he clearly won't let minor details like that stand in the way of him defending his homeland from invaders. The man is a badass Determinator in every sense of the word.
• Gordon Freeman of the Half-Life series. He's teleported to another dimension as the test chamber he's in is destroyed, then he climbs all the way to the surface past hordes of monsters to get help, finds out the government is cleaning up the mess by killing everyone involved, and he keeps moving forward without a clear purpose in mind until he's told about the Lambda team and eventually goes into another dimension to kill a gigantic telepathic creature called the Nihilanth. Then in the first sequel, he finds out that many years have passed since that and he goes up against a group of oppressors who have conquered countless worlds and dimensions and have already pretty much conquered Earth after a brief 7 hour war — yeah, just 7 hours to conquer Earth — and he gets a messianic reputation from both the events at Black Mesa and the major bulldozing he gives the Combine. Doctor Breen has to give little speeches to Combine soldiers where he berates them and points out that Gordon Freeman is just one man, but it doesn't do any good.
• Both the Master Chief and the Arbiter in Halo fit this pretty well. The Chief in particular literally does not believe in losing and will continue fighting against any odds.
  Cortana: Just one question: what if you miss?
  Master Chief: I won't.
  • The Chief kind of has a thing where he won't die. The Arbiter's first and one of his last lines in Halo 3 lampshade just how difficult it is to kill John.
  The Arbiter: Were it so easy.
• Ethan Mars from Heavy Rain. No matter what potentially fatal situation he ends up in for one of his trials, he just won’t die. Nothing will stop him from saving his son.
• Cruiser Tetron, the Big Bad from Hero Core. Get him down to a sliver of his health and he'll collapse in the corner, unable to even stand, and only able to briefly lift his gun to fire at you. But he still keeps trying to fight.
• Ib: Both Ib and Garry are this, Ib never giving up trying to escape and Garry risking his life to protect her, despite the fact that Ib is a 9-year-old girl and that Garry is scared at several points by relatively harmless things.
• Iji appears as this to the Komato and Tasen troops, no matter whether the player is on a Pacifist Run or a Genocide Run. If the latter, they're terrified of how she doesn't stop killing, no matter what, and how her shotgun never runs out of ammo. If the former, they're a bit more concerned about how if she keeps collecting all the ammunition she passes, she might turn into a black hole. Either way, she'll stop at nothing to prevent another Alpha Strike.
• If Rhythm-based games count, anyone who forces themselves through In the Groove's Determinator is certainly this.
• The Kid from I Wanna Be the Guy. Also, anybody who manages to play through I Wanna Be The Guy.
• The robed beings in Journey (2012) become this toward the end of the game. Have a box of tissues on standby, especially if you're playing with a friend.
• In Just Shapes & Beats, the protagonist is a blue square that, when failing a level and falling to pieces, will put itself back together out of presumably sheer force of will. What really solidifies this is, when the player is pressing the button to reform, the "IT'S OVER" text will be overlaid with "NO", and will be replaced with "IT'S NOT OVER" when getting back up. At least, until the end of the True Final Boss battle, where the protagonist's attempts to resurrect are stopped by the Big Bad until the player finally stops trying.
• Kingdom Hearts:
  • Terra from Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. Master Xehanort sets innumerable Unversed on him, has him attacked by Braig, manipulates him into distrusting and ultimately killing his mentor and father figure Eraqus, and attempts to kill his best friends, all so he can awaken Terra's inner darkness enough to possess him and make off with his body. Does this stop Terra? No. His mind inhabits his armour , which stands up again and proceeds to beat the everliving daylights out of his own possessed body. There's a reason why the armor animated with his spirit is called the "Lingering Will". This is shown in Kingdom Hearts 2, where the Lingering Will is the strongest Superboss in the game. At the end of the fight, it's implied he's not even winded.
  • Ventus is one. He's not quite up to Terra's level, but anybody who can unfreeze themselves from a block of ice based on nothing more than willpower deserves mentioning.
  • Beast, in the first game. He was able to follow Belle to an entirely different world without any portals or ships as his own was consumed by darkness. He tore through reality through sheer force of will.
  • Of all the innumerable charaters from this series who could be put on this page, Aqua should be here. Ten years of living in the dark realm without any protection, and she hasn't given in to the darkness. Nobody is supposed to be able to do that for more than a few minutes. Aqua does it for twelve years.
• Most of the Kirby villains just don't want to give up.
  • King Dedede can be this Depending on the Writer. More specifically, in Kirby Battle Royale, where he fights Kirby no less than thrice and even sics the Dededestroyer Z on him when all attempts fail, and Kirby Fighters 2, where he resorts to pulling out a Maxim Tomato after being defeated the first time in Chapter 4 And even brings out the Mask of Dark Bonds to increase his and Meta Knight's strength at the end of Chapter 5.
  • Queen Sectonia in Kirby: Triple Deluxe. She fights Kirby three times and despite all the times she fails, she gets right back up to continue the battle. And if the True Arena is to be believed, she managed to survive being blasted in the face by Kirby's laser at the end of the game for long enough to absorb four Miracle Fruits and become Soul of Sectonia. And if that wasn't enough, she even loses it and rips her own head off of the Dreamstalk just for one final bout with Kirby.
  • There's also Star Dream from Kirby: Planet Robobot. Clearly, its battle takes longer than other final bosses in the series, and it takes four phases for it to finally bite the dust. First, it fights on its own. [[spoiler:Then, it merges with the Access Ark and rips it off of its drill legs to continue the battle. After that, it then reveals itself to be a Galactic Nova - yes, one very similar to the one we met in Milky Way Wishes - and still continues to fight Kirby. Even when all of its defenses are down, it continues to fight Kirby back by summoning barrier after barrier to hold him off and even tries firing several lasers to finish him off before he manages to drill it in. Then, in the True Arena, it enters its "final program": Star Dream Soul OS. And to ensure its final victory, it deletes Haltmann's soul. It even inhales Kirby to fight its core and later decides to battle Kirby itself when it deals enough damage. And last but not least, one can't forget to mention the Taking You with Me attack it does after depleting its health bar, clearly a sign that the all-powerful supercomputer is using one final trick to finish Kirby.
  • Finally, there's Fecto Forgo of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, easily the biggest contender of the most determined villain of the franchise. First, they chase Kirby through the underground of Lab Discovera in their horrific Blob Monster form. When they are defeated, they then absorb their other half, Elfilin, and enter their true form, Fecto Elfilis. Then, when Kirby frees Elfilin, they get so furious that they decide to Colony Drop Planet Popstar onto the New World, clearly showing no concern over how many lives will be lost in the process. Not even death can stop them, as they capture Leongar and shatter his soul in the post-game so they can have a new vessel to possess and continue their plans. And when Forgo Leon falls, they decide to emerge and reveal their Soul form and decide to fight Kirby themselves, only to be assimilated by Morpho Knight. But not even that can stop them; they absorb their powers for themselves and take control of the Colosseum and create a new pocket dimension known as the Ultimate Cup Z, where they fight Kirby one final time as Chaos Elfilis, even resorting to a new orb form to finally take them down. Once Kirby finally ends their reign of terror, though, they finally give in and willingly absorb themselves into Elfilin, finally accepting that they are one of the same. This especially helps that the post-game and the Colosseum are canon instead of being separate stories from the main game.
• Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords:
  • This was Atton Rand's special ability. Unless he was the last man in the party standing, he literally got back up and kept fighting, his saving throws getting better the more damage was dished out on him!
  • Darth Sion, who has been shot, stabbed and blown up so many times that his sheer hatred and determination are literally all that's holding his body together. The only way to kill him is to convince him to give up.
    Darth Sion: You seek to erode my will. You will not succeed.
    Gameplay message: [You have eroded Sion's will, reducing his Will saves, Constitution, and Wisdom.]

L-N

• Joel and Ellie from The Last of Us. They spend the better part of a year going back and forth across a ruined North America trying to find La Résistance. All the while not only having to find supplies to survive but also fight off hordes of human and infected enemies as well. Heck, even near fatal injuries don't slow Joel down after a shot of Penicillin.
  • Ellie herself comes into her own as a Determinator in The Last of Us Part II, going through hell and high water for the sake of avenging Joel. At one point, she finds out where Abby and her remaining friends are holed up. However the area to get there is flooded by ocean water and a storm rolls in as she makes her way to the building via motorboat. Halfway there, the motor conks out and she's knocked overboard by a wave. For a normal person, this would spell instant death. But Ellie manages to swim the rest of the way. She's that hellbent on settling the score.
  • One of the bosses in The Last of Us Part II simply refuses to die. He has his back torn open, receives multiple slashes and stabs from a sickle, has his cheek completely torn apart, gets an arrow shot through his chest, and takes a large fall and still tries to strangle you to death. He only gives in after you break the tip of the arrow off and stab him in the neck, the eye, and the neck again.
• League of Legends:
  • Nautilus. He was dragged to the bottom of the sea (bringing the anchor of his ship with him). His diver's suit fused to his body and his memory was fuzzy at best. Despite all of this, he walked along the bottom of the sea, in complete darkness and loneliness, to find the people who left him to die and make them pay. In-game, he can take a lot of punishment before going down and has some respectable damage behind him.
  • Garen's passive ties in with his hometowns military rules of not retreating, making him a determinator.
  • Tryndamere's ultimate skill, Undying Rage, grants him immortality for 5 seconds. Even with his health at 1 hit point, he can continue to take damage that would normally kill him several times over and still walk away — and he doesn't have any superhuman abilities or powers. He does it through sheer rage and adrenaline.
• Left 4 Dead: The Tank, the hyper-steroid zombie juggernaut. He will take several shotgun shots to the head, get burned, or even scale a building to try to kill those survivors.
  • The Witch, who can do the same things as the Tank (except the scale a building part), all the while being more difficult to get rid of.
    • And now, Bill. The latest comic goes out of its way to prove this. He gets punched by a tank after dashing off to save his friends. The next panel shows him sat by a turbine, preparing to fight 3 tanks. And in "The Passing" DLC, you find him... sat in the EXACT same spot. Dead from blood-loss, but still in the exact same position.
    • Nick of Left 4 Dead 2 also counts, as shown by one of his more awesome lines:
  "I have NOT come this far, to die now!
• Link of The Legend of Zelda will do freakin' anything to stop the Big Bad, including setting off volcanoes, turning back country-sized shrouds of twilight, killing monsters across multiple worlds as a kid, and generally making the timestream his plaything. Fear? Please. It's called the Triforce of Courage for a reason. And if he has some fairies with him...
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword takes this to extremes. From the few interactions Link has with other characters, it's apparent that saving Zelda is pretty much the only thing on his mind most of the time, and absolutely everything he does is working toward that goal. In fact, it's the reason he's The Chosen One. Hylia/Zelda chose him to be The Hero explicitly because she trusted him never to quit, even in another life. It doesn't get much more Determinator-y than that.
  • Link is matched only by his greatest nemesis, Ganon. Turn Ganon to stone, lock him in a void, or just SLAY him, Ganon will rise again. It just doesn't stick. Of course, it helps that the Triforce bearers have some kind of mutual reanimation clause going on. In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, when Link defeats him, he coughs up blood and stops breathing. Then, after Link and Zelda escape, he somehow comes back to life and turns into Ganon. After Link kills him for the second time by stabbing him through the head, he shows up again in the very next cutscene having apparently sustained no physical injuries and is just trapped in the Sacred Realm.
    • Demise, Ganon's precursor, has to be put on here too. Lost a humungous battle with a deity? Check. Sealed no less than 3 times by Link? Big deal- he'll just break free again. Got a freaking statue dropped on his head from above the clouds? Alright, he's dead- oh, no, wait: Ghirahim manages to kidnap Zelda and feed him her soul, allowing him to rise in his true form. Then, he is finally defeated by Link- takes the Master Sword straight into the forehead. What's left of him is sealed into the sword and permanently kept at bay by Fi. We all good? Nope- His final curse basically says that he is going to be reborn perpetually, forcing all of Link's/Zelda's descendants to deal with his reincarnations forever. He's basically the reason for every single Big Bad in the entire timeline- and also why it's so hard to permanently kill Ganon.
• Brad of LISA. In order to save his adopted daughter Buddy he fights off entire gangs of armed psychos and their warlords, is hit by multiple cars, firebombed, dropped off of cliffs, mauled by super-powered mutants, can lose one or both of his arms, and eventually fights a marathon battle of about twenty men and their nigh-unkillable leader Rando unarmed and by himself before succumbing to his wounds. Even then he still survives as a mindless Joy Mutant. It's worth noting that Brad is the only party member able to survive perma-death moves which are described as having your head bitten/chopped off or your neck snapped.
• Six, from Little Nightmares can count as this. Not much is known about her except the fact that she will stop at nothing to escape the horrors of the Maw overcoming starvation, escaping monsters, and even beats The Lady who possessed supernatural powers.
  • The sequel, Little Nightmares II stars Mono who is said to be "uncommonly single-minded" and rarely gives up when he sets out to do something. He is unrelentless when Six is kidnapped, going at far as literally moving buildings in a desperate attempt to get her back.
• All of the protagonists of Lunar: Eternal Blue fits this to some degree, except for Lucia. In fact, one of the key points of the game is the "power of humanity" to never give up even in the face of impossible odds. The best example is when the entire party is struck down by Ghaleon... and then, through sheer willpower, all five stand back up on their own and fight him a second time.
• James Earl Cash and Daniel Lamb from Manhunt 1 and 2 respectively. Not even being faced against armed gangs of sexual deviants, racists, psychopaths, mercenaries, and Corrupt Cops will stop them from reaching their respective goal.
• The Security Officer from Marathon has a job to do, and if anyone gets in his way, may God help them. Get teleported onto an alien ship? Fight through the hordes and start a rebellion. Left with no weapons, heavily injured, and in an area with hostile wildlife, while almost consistently submerged in water? Just beat them all to death. An unstoppable god-like horror from beyond the veil awakening? Force reality to fix itself by time travelling. It doesn't seem that anything the Pfhor throw at him can make him falter, to nigh Implacable Man levels.
• Commander Shepard and their crew from Mass Effect. They face incredible odds to say the least, where failure is not an option and come out on top. Shepard and their team's reputation for We Do the Impossible is very well deserved.
  • Most of the alien races seem to think that humans are like this on a species level, largely because humanity's first contact with alien life came in the form of a short war; where despite only having mass effect technology for less than ten years at the time, they somehow managed to hold their own against the Turians, who had been the galaxy's reigning Badass Army for over 2000 years. The result was a 3 month long ground war that was locked in a virtual stalemate and the Turians gearing up for a full-scale assault on Earth, before the Citadel Council intervened and called a ceasefire.
  • Captain Kirrahe. He will hold the line.
  • The entire crew of the Normandy in Mass Effect 2.
  • Death itself couldn't stop Commander Shepard from killing Reapers. Garrus notes in Mass Effect 2 that the Collectors actually did succeed in killing Shepard, and that it only seems to have pissed him/her off.
  • Specialist Traynor calls him/her an "unstoppable juggernaut of headbutting destruction".
  • Shepard, after being sedated for two days, manages to wake up to the shock of the people keeping him sedated. What does s/he then do? S/he punches out both guards in the room and then proceeds to tear through an entire facility of elite assault troopers by themselves.
  • Zaeed survived getting shot in the head.
    "A stubborn enough person can survive just about anything. Rage is a hell of an anesthetic."
  • Tela Vasir of the "Shadow Broker" DLC is this in spades, She takes on Shepard tackling her out of a 4+ story building, survives massive car crash, loses tons of blood, and still has enough in her to be one of the toughest (if not the toughest) boss fights in the series. Badass.
  • Kai Leng. In Mass Effect: Retribution, he escapes Anderson despite having TWO BLOWN OUT KNEECAPS by climbing a ladder with his arms and jumping onto his shuttle with said blown out kneecaps. In one trailer for Mass Effect 3, he is literally climbing on top of a speeding flying car in order to take down Shepard.
  • Thane Krios, a terminally ill Drell assassin. In Mass Effect 3, his Doctor's had given him only 3 months to live... over 9 months ago. Furthermore, despite his illness causing him difficulty breathing, he can still manage to come to Shepard's aid during the Cerberus Coup of the Citadel and kick Kai Leng's ass, preventing him from assassinating the Salarian Councillor. Unfortunately, Kai Leng manages to mortally wound him during this, but nonetheless, he dies a hero.
  • Shepard deserves special mention for the ending of Mass Effect 3. S/He's been shot by Harbinger's main cannon, which was designed to destroy Dreadnoughts, most of his/her armor burned away by the blast, and s/he gets back up and keeps on limping towards the Catalyst while blasting his/her way through Husks and Marauders.
    • It's also heavily implied that s/he's under greater stress in his/her resting state than s/he's ever been in his/her life, but tries to pass it off as normal battle adrenaline and keeps on going (almost) like normal. Keep in mind, that depending on Shepard's possible backstory, this includes almost single-handedly holding off 10,000 batarians (War Hero), witnessing the death of their entire squad by Thresher Maws (Sole Survivor), or employing We Have Reserves against the batarians at Torfan (Ruthless).
  • Krogan are this by nature. Mass Effect 3 reveals that the Graal Spike Thrower, a Krogan designed shotgun, was designed specifically for hunting Thresher Maws, towering high beasts which typically require a tank to take them down (unless they take the tank down first). Said shotgun was thus designed with special blades built in, meant to allow an unlucky Krogan swallowed by a Maw to either cut his way out, or at least cause severe internal bleeding to try and take it with them. Overall, it says something about the Krogan that they designed a gun believing it a very real possibility that they might be eaten at some point.
  • The Leviathan DLC puts the punctation mark on Shepard: the Leviathan species, who are literally billions of years old had never seen someone like Shepard. Their assessment: "your confidence is singular."
  • Ryder from Mass Effect: Andromeda. It doesn't matter how bad the situation is, Ryder just keeps going. At the game's climax, they're severed from SAM, who is by that point required for them to stay alive. Ryder gets back up onto their feet, and drags themselves back to their ship to get "fucking payback" on the kett.
  • The angara are a whole race of determinators. Their worlds cut off from one another by a horrific Negative Space Wedgie, and rendered nigh-uninhabitable to boot, their people betrayed and invaded by a much larger enemy, and their army utterly broken, the angara just keep fighting for decades. There's a reason their word for "resistance" also translates to "stubborn bastard".
• Max Payne:
  • All three games take place in a timespan of about 24 hours, during which Max hardly ever rests, is beaten up repeatedly, falls from serious heights, is shot and drugged on a regular basis and only really remains standing by virtue of dozens of dozens of painkillers. Of course, none of this stops him from going on a (mostly) solo Roaring Rampage of Revenge across town, until he's found and killed whoever mistakenly believed that killing a maverick cop with a deathwish was going to be easy.
    Nicole Horne: What do you mean, "he's unstoppable"? You are superior to him in every way that counts. You are better trained, better equipped, and you outnumber him at least twenty-to-one. Do. Your. Job.
    Vladimir Lem: What the fuck is wrong with you, Max? Why don't you just die? You hate life, you're miserable all the time, afraid to enjoy yourself even a little! Face it, you might as well be dead already. Do yourself a favor, give up!
  • Count also Lieutenant Jim Bravura, Max's superior at the precinct, when he gets gunned down by a submachine gun at the hospital in the prologue of the second game but clings to life. As Max puts it, he's too stubborn to die from something like that.
• Mega Man Legends series: The Bonne family could be considered this. Throughout the series they are constantly beaten in battle by some blue kid and his friends, or find themselves completely out of money, but they don't give up. It's even noted by an NPC partway through game 1. Through all of the explosions and failures, the Bonne pirates always find a way to survive and attack Megaman again and again. (If only Capcom shared their determination...)
• As for the Metal Gear series, just about everyone who has or once had "Snake" in their codename is one. Must run in the family.
  • For example, Liquid Snake is pretty determined to kill his brother. After having several Stinger missiles launched into his face, being inside the 30ft tall Metal Gear as it explodes, losing an intense fistfight on top of the 30ft tall Metal Gear, falling off said 30ft tall Metal Gear, getting shot in the face multiple times with a machine gun, and flipping over a Jeep going about 90mph (basically everything Solid Snake could've possibly tried in order to kill him), it's the nanomachine virus (that would've killed him instantly anyway, no matter the condition of his body at the time) that finally does him in.
  • Naked Snake in Metal Gear Solid 3 is a straighter example in that he continues the mission even when his old mentor (someone of which he described their relationship as being "deeper than love") utterly whoops his ass every time they meet.
  • Raiden, by the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 doesn't know what he's actually fighting for, and doesn't even know if anything he's going through is real—he may just be losing his mind for all he knows. That doesn't stop him from taking down dozens of RAYs single-handedly. Then he finds out what was really going on...and doesn't stop fighting for a second.
  • Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 4 is equaled in his stubborn desire to get himself killed only by his inability to give up under any circumstances. A bisexual vampire incessantly stabs you in the torso? Just fight harder! A building falls on you and you can't move? Meh, you don't really need those limbs! Oh, now someone's about to ram a battleship into your best friend? Bring it!
  • And in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, after becoming an ever more powerful cyborg he finds himself weaponless and severely outmatched against the final boss, yet despite being literally beaten into the ground several times, he keeps getting up until a Big Damn Heroes moment from one of his allies grants him a better sword, evening the fight.
    • In the opening stage of the same game, we see Raiden, pre-upgrade, going toe-to-toe with Jetstream Sam. Even after having one arm severed and an eye cut out, he still tries his level best to fight, even in his weakened state.
    • When Raiden defeats Sundowner, the latter jumps into a helicopter that shoots missiles at Raiden and knocks him off the roof of World Marshall HQ. Does Raiden give up and fall to his death? Hell no! He commandeers a Slider while he's still falling, flies into and up the crumbling building, slashes his way back to the roof and steers the Slider into Sundowner's helicopter, before reducing him to confetti after the helicopter explodes.
  • Raiden's predecessor, the Cyborg Ninja Grey Fox is almost the total embodiment of this trope. After all, he gets brought back from being killed by a land mine and takes on a walking assault tank armed with lasers, railguns, rockets etc. And even then only begins to slow down after having a third of his body sliced off.
    Grey Fox: A cornered fox is more dangerous than a jackal!
  • Not to mention Solid Snake himself, who spends most of the time between later missions coughing up his lungs and trying to put himself back together with sticky tape. It doesn't stop him for a moment.
    • There's a point where he crawled through what's essentially a giant microwaved hallway, even if you lost all your health/psyche points, he will still crawl out... by his fingertips!
  • Ocelot — the only character to appear in all the MGS games — is stubborn enough to implant another personality into himself to carry on the plans his idol had for the world.
  • Volgin. Beat him up with your fists, grenades, shotgun, and whatever else you may have, and then blow up the weapons hangar with him in it? He blasts his way out with the Shagohod and chases after you, trampling everything and everyone who would get in his way, including flipping over a jet on the runway. Blow up the bridge he's crossing? He launches the Shagohod out of the wreckage and keeps coming. Pepper the Shagohod with RPGs until it finally breaks down? He punches his way out of the cockpit, uses his electrical powers to reanimate the blasted husk of a tank, and keeps on coming while you fire more RPGs and sniper bullets at his exposed body. And he STILL DOESN'T DIE until being struck by a lightning causes the bullets he wears all over his body to explode. And as Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain reveals, even that doesn't stop him from coming back as the rage-filled Man on Fire a full twenty years later! Liquid would be proud.
  • The Boss. The woman was the strongest of a team that singlehandedly WON WORLD WAR TWO. She fought on Normandy, while PREGNANT! She had to have a C-section, and got shot during it! Then she got up and kept fighting. Even when she knows she's about to die, she's almost suicidal from the loss of The Sorrow, but still gives Naked Snake one hell of a fight in the end. That's a determinator if we ever saw one.
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Deconstructions this. Big Boss and Kaz are willing to go to the ends of the Earth to get revenge on Cipher and XOF, and are also willing to cross every moral line imaginable to do so. This is portrayed as a VERY bad thing.
    • The game also has Eli, who can take several punches and still get up every time, despite being a mere child. Except he's not a mere child, but the aforementioned Liquid Snake.
• Metroid:
  • Samus Aran. Certain logbook entries written by the space pirates in the Prime series mentions that no matter what they do, nothing has been able to stop the "hunter clad in metal".
  • Among the things they have tried are elite Commandos and Commanders trained specifically to kill her and only her, Elite Pirates with her common tactics programmed directly into their brains, turning her weapons against her, blowing up the planet she is on, and throwing Dark Samus at her, who herself has tried corrupting Samus with radioactive physics breaking phazon, collapsing a dimension on her, and blowing up yet another planet in an attempt to kill Samus. By this point, the Space Pirates truly believe that "The Hunter" is an Eldritch Abomination that has cursed them for eternity. And then, there's the sheer number of other random bosses and waves and waves of mooks. And then there's Dark Aether, where even the planet's AIR is trying to kill you.
  • Her arch nemesis, Ridley, counts as well. He was blown up before the series began, but recovered, then he was beaten in the original Metroid. He was turned into the cyborg Meta Ridley. The fact that this cyborg form looks entirely mechanical is a testament both to Samus' fury to inflict that much damage, and Ridley's tenacity to survive. This form is fought in Metroid Prime, culminating in him taking several lasers to the chest from Chozo statues, falling off a cliff, and exploding. He comes back in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, first on Norion, where Samus sends him plummeting into a reactor core, then in a Phazon-corrupted form on the Pirate Homeworld, where she blows him up with a Phazon overload. He still returns, fully organic, in Super Metroid, where not only is he beaten, but the planet he's on blows up. In Metroid: Other M, he's basically ressurected as a baby, escapes from his cage by killing the scientists who saw him as a pet, tricks a clueless Samus into helping him to eat and evolve, and as soon as he matured enough he proceeds to attack Samus. Said attack leads her to have a PTSD reaction, since she thought he was gone for good since Super Metroid. After regaining her senses, she manages to harm him enough to make him flee. While healing his wounds, Ridley notices an ennemy lurking in the shadows, and starts to panic when he realizes that his opponent is a massive Metroid Queen. She kills him by sucking all his life energy, leaving only his dried-out carcass behind. In Metroid Fusion, said carcass is preserved in a cold room, but is infected with X-Parasites before Samus arrived, and later shattered without her intervention, the X-parasites having assimilated his DNA. Later, Samus ends up fighting a X-parasite copy of a fully regenerated Ridley, who is once again defeated. After that, nobody knows how he's going to come back, but one thing is sure: Ridley just won't stay dead.
  • Super Metroid's Crocomire. Anything that keeps trying to kill you even after being reduced to a skeleton should certainly qualify, even if it does just fall over dead without doing anything.
• Talion of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. His entire character can be summed up in the sequel during his Darkest Hour. After being betrayed by both Celebrimbor and Eltariel and left for dead, he puts on one of the Nine Rings, knowing it'll eventually turn him into a Ringwraith, promising, "As long as there is breath in my body, my fate is my own."
  • Uruks with the Iron Will trait can resist Celebrimbor's mind control (with some help from Sauron); to recruit these uruks, you have to Mind Rape them until their will wears down. Uruks that have been betrayed by you earn this trait automatically. Baz and Gaz will never remove their Iron Will perks (because you crossed the line when you fried Bruz's mind), and Daz in particular cannot be branded. Ever.
• The de facto creed of the average Monster Hunter. They spend most of their days engaging giant beasts, fire-breathing dragons, and all other sorts of fantastical megafauna with little more than some cool armor and particular genetics setting them apart from normal humans. But no matter what kind of devastating attacks they take, they refuse to lay down and die, and will always get back on their feet as many times as it takes to conquer a given challenge... for as long as the Hunter's Guild is willing to pay for the operation, anyway.
• The New Order Last Days Of Europe has Nowa Polska (New Poland) as a nation of those. During the 40s, following their victory in World War II, Nazi Germany deported many Poles without food and supplies to the frozen wastes of Siberia and deserts of Kazakhstan to let them die here. Instead, they managed to organize themselves under the leadership of Marian Spychalski in such desolate lands and formed a settlement in Western Kazakhstan, refusing to die without a fight.
  • Most of the Russian unifiers are driven by some political ideology like communism, liberal pluralism, monarchism or fascism. The Black League of Omsk is driven only by hatred and anger. Their mission is to avenge twenty years of brutal oppression and humiliation by exterminating the German people and rendering all of their cities and creations unto dust, and destroying anything else that stands in the way. Absolutely nothing will make them stop: Democracy? Don't be silly, comrade, democracy is just an impediment to fighting Germany! Diplomatic unification? No, they do not understand the scope of the Great Trial, they have to be subdued forcefully. The OFN? If they try and stop the Great Trial then they are the enemy as well! The Germans have nukes? Well, we'll build more nukes than them, and build plenty of bunkers too! Then the radioactive dust has settled, we'll march through the nuclear snow to Berlin and stomp all over the ruins!
• NieR: Automata has a vicious Deconstruction of this trope. The superweapon Emil has several clones who fought an endless war with the opposing machines and never came close to winning. They kept fighting, but it cost them their sense of self and sanity.
• Ryu Hayabusa of Ninja Gaiden. Within the first hour of the game, he is quite literally killed, but that doesn't stop him. Later, he is transformed into one of the demonic fiends he's been fighting against, and he doesn't miss a beat.
• Asagi from various Nippon Ichi games. Five games, five years, as many defeats by actual main characters, playing second banana to a freakin' Prinny, and all of it still has not extinguished her desire to, finally, one day, become a main character.
• Nobody Saves the World: Randy gets put through a lot of punishment and still keeps going. He even manages to fight the Calamity, alone, for hours.
• No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle has this as a game mechanic as well: After your HP is reduced to zero, you get a window of opportunity to furiously shake the wiimote until Travis recovers and gets back a couple units of health. This can even be done a few times per section (which you'll definitely need against certain bosses, and even moreso on Bitter Mode.)
  • There is a reason for which Jasper Batt Jr.'s second form is That One Boss: his instant killing attack triggers a cutscene of Travis' death, removing any chance of getting some last second wind.

O-Q

• In Ōkami, Waka shows just how determined he can be just shortly after revealing he was Good All Along. First, he tries to fight Yami, until he loses his laser sword Pillow Talk. Then when Yami starts dishing out Death Ray's aimed at Amaterasu, he blocks them with his regular sword. And even once he is completely disarmed, he still stands in front of Ammy to take one last attack for her.
• While all the characters in 1001 Spikes can technically be seen as this, it's the main character who plays it to a tee. His whole motivation is to prove himself to his rather emotionally abusive dead father, and no amount of spikes, fire, poison darts or any other sort of death will stop him. Taken up to eleven in the second part of the game, where, after he hears his father might not be dead at all, he goes to explore Antarctica with the sole goal of meeting him again and punching him in the face.
• Persona series:
  • The main character from Persona 3:
    • during the real Final Battle. He's receiving an attack that performs instant 9999 damage (in a game with a 999 HP cap) and still stands up. At first he's Weak to them and gets knocked off his feet, but The Power of Friendship and The Power of Love keep pulling him to his feet, until they coalesce into the mother of all Combined Energy Attacks that he uses to seal off the enemy... albeit at the cost of his own life.
    • The protagonist also hangs onto life for two months after that, continuing on nothing but willpower in order to keep the promise the main characters made to meet on the roof of the school on graduation day as proof of everything they went through together. He dies seconds before they arrive.
  • Persona 4 provides a spoileriffic example, namely Nanako Dojima; her will to live after being near-fatally injured in the TV World gets her to make a miraculous full recovery, even after a Disney Death (in the good ending path, at least).
• Pikmin: Although his wife has told him he gives up too easily, Captain Olimar's actions throughout the series make it abundantly clear that rolling over and dying just isn't in his playbook. Even if he's lost all hope, whether it's finding the missing pieces of his ship, rescuing his company from debt, or trying to escape an ethereal monstrosity that's holding him hostage, Olimar will keep fighting, keep leading the Pikmin, and make his way home or die trying.
• Vhailor from Planescape: Torment, a Knight Templar so unstoppably dedicated to his cause that 'being dead' is a minor inconvenience to him, and also a really paltry excuse for trying to take a rest off from his duty of punishing the guilty.
• A tie-in comic to Portal 2 reveals that Chell, the player character, was actually supposed to be rejected from testing for her off-the-scale, nearly pathological tenacity.^note It may also count as a bit of a meta-joke on her being the Player Character and therefore unstoppable in the face of infinite reloads. Rattmann arranged for her file to be transferred to the testing area because she had the right stuff to take on GLaDOS, and the rest is history. At the end of Portal 2, she comes to the conclusion that the easiest way to "eliminate" Chell is to toss her out of the facility and tell her to never come back.
  GLaDOS: The best solution is the easiest one. And killing you is hard.
  • In Portal 2, this is shown to extend beyond Chell and even to things she creates. An area of the facility where a sign explains it was once the location of a "Bring Your Daughter To Work Day," implies that Chell is the daughter of an Aperture Employee and once took part in a science fair, where they were tasked with creating a simple potato battery. In the many years since, while the other experiments have sat gathering dust, Chell's potato instead grew out-of-control and even sprouts through the ceiling!
  • Doug Rattman, the researcher mentioned above, counts as well. The sole surviving scientist of Aperture Science and GLaDOS' wrath, he managed to elude her for years and scribble maniacal ravings within hidden chambers with no portal device, only the "help" of the Companion Cube and his own schizophrenia. Upon seeing Chell being dragged back into Aperture Science, rather than escaping he goes back to save her and ensure that she survives until Portal 2, even after being repeatedly shot by turrets.
  • Cave Johnson also counts, refusing to let government investigations, years of failure, bankruptcy, and his own staggering incompetence stop him from doing SCIENCE!
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within has the Dahaka, an embodiment of fate and guardian of the timeline, who hunts the Prince after he attracted its attention by his liberal use of time-altering powers that allowed him to cheat death many times over in the first game. And in the other corner the Prince himself, who is just as determined to find a way to get rid of the monster as the Dahaka is to kill him. A secondary character lampshades this:
  Kaileena: I had hoped the Dahaka would kill you. I had hoped that Shahdee would keep you from the Island. I even cursed the sword I gave you, AND YET YOU DID NOT DIE!
• Progressbar 95 has Clippy. No matter how many times you tap on OK to make him go away, he will come back to annoy you again in a few seconds.
• [PROTOTYPE]: "NOTHING CAN PROTECT YOU FROM ME! NOT MEN! NOT WEAPONS! NOT ARMOR!"
  • And then there's James Heller, who survives the Zombie Apocalypse without superpowers!
  • The Hunters have an annoying tendency to be this, too.
• In the Wii version of Punch-Out!!, it's an actual GAME MECHANIC for Little Mac to occasionally come back from sure defeat with one final burst of strength if you're doing reasonably well in the fight. Really cool when it happens, and even cooler to come back and WIN when it happens.
  • In the more traditional sense, Super Punch-Out!! has Gabby Jay! (YAY!) His all-time fight record is one win and ninety-nine losses, he's been demoted to a jobber judging by his being the very first fight of the Minor Circuit, and he happens to be one of the oldest fighters in the entire game at 56 years old. Despite all of this, he insists that he's got it in him to win just one more fight, and won't even think about retiring until he does.
  • Glass Joe is similar, and it pays off in the Wii game's Title Defense mode.
  Doc Louis: Woowee, Mac baby! Let's give Glass Joe a little respect here, okay... He can always take a whoopin'! Ha ha ha!

R-T

• Randal's Monday: Randal, outside one brief moment between the prison chapter and apocalypse chapter. The guy spends six years trying to escape the "Groundhog Day" Loop.
• Receiver 2: So long as its battery is still intact a Killdrone will keep trying to kill you, even if they're missing half their parts and can't actually do so. You still need to be careful even if you think they're disabled, turrets might still have a shot in their chamber if their ammo box is destroyed or might fire even if their motor's broken, and a downed taser drone can still tase you if you step on it.
• The Nemesis of Resident Evil 3: Nemesis fame should be the poster boy of this trope. It's a massive 8 foot tall B.O.W. that's programmed to kill all the members of S.T.A.R.S. after killing Brad right in front of you, it sets it's sights on Jill: The character who you play as, AND who happens to be the last member of S.T.A.R.S. No matter how far you run, or how many times you actually manage to put him down (About 15 shotgun shells on EASY will do the trick), he'll be back. Often with a ROCKET LAUNCHER. Did I mention it can run FASTER than you? Or that it's SMART?
  • T-103 Batch Number 00 (Often known as Mr. X) from Resident Evil 2 also counts. While not nearly as memorable as the Nemesis (You only encounter him in a New Game Plus), he's every bit as unstoppable. Even dropping him in a vat of molten steel only manages to piss him off, as well as burn off the coat that was stopping him from going One-Winged Angel.
  • The remake takes this a step further, as Mr.X is encountered in every campaign. Unlike before, he now follows you through every hallway in the Police Department. You cannot kill him until the final boss fight, and this only occurs with Leon, and he can and will follow you through doors. To make matters worse, there are moments in both campaigns when he shows up without warning in new areas and becomes a new hazard you have to escape.
  • Resident Evil 6 gives us the Ustanak: a Nemesis Expy that haunts Sherry and Jake throughout their entire chapter. Like the T-103, dropping him in lava is only enough to seriously piss him off (And reveal his weak point, thankfully).
  • Ethan Winters, protagonist of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil Village, is no trained badass like the rest of the franchise's protagonists, but no horror will stop him from saving his family. Even death can't keep him down, as it's revealed in the latter game that Jack Baker actually killed him in the previous game's prologue with that foot stomp. He's kept together by the Mold but stays in control of himself through sheer determination and love.
• River City Girls: "If You Dare": The singer / speaker fights against all odds:
  Every odd stands in my way,
  they'll just have to pay.
• After Sparkster destroys most of its body, the final boss of Rocket Knight Adventures follows him off the exploding Pig Star and keeps fighting him as they re-enter Elhorn's atmosphere. It doesn't stop trying to kill him until it is vaporized by the heat.
• The Boss in the Saints Row series might as well be a walking-talking death machine. Even when stoned, they can still fight off enemies en masse.
  • Johnny Gat can survive a point-blank shotgun shot to the kneecap and keep fighting. He can also survive being impaled by a katana. Not to mention all of the other seemingly hopeless situations he has gotten himself out of.
• Wander from Shadow of the Colossus. As the game progresses, Wander's body is clearly deteriorating from all of his battles. Not even something as petty as dying could stop him. He must really have loved her.
• Nothing, and I mean nothing, will stop the protagonists of Silent Hill from their goals, except maybe getting abducted by aliens.
• Cobra from the Silent Scope series. "I am immortal! Even if my body collapses, I will not die until I defeat you!"
• Vyse from Skies of Arcadia. In fact, his Infinity Plus One Title can only be achieved by (among other things) never running from a single battle. At all. Vyse retains this trait in his cameo apperance in Valkyria Chronicles in the form of his unlockable potential "Challenge Lover".
  • The Empire holding your friends and family hostage? "It won't be easy, but we'll get them back... somehow."
  • Trapped inside an impenetrable that no-one has ever escaped from? "Ha! No-one's ever escaped from it because I've never tried! I love a challenge!" He gets imprisoned there again later in the game, and escapes then too.
  • Stranded on a desert island alone? "Might as well think of this as some sort of vacation. Meanwhile, time to start fixing my busted lifeboat."
  • Home base invaded and razed to the ground? "Hey, we were always talking about how we wanted to redecorate."
• SLAMMED!: Despite being massively unsuited to wrestling, Ecstasy won't give up trying and can even place in the final two of the Reality Show if you help them, which is noted to be their greatest asset. When you ask them about it, they'll say they're doing it as a sort of homage to their birth dad.
• Kali from the MOBA Smite has an ultimate skill that allows her to keep fighting for several seconds, even when all her health is gone. She simply refuses to die. Enemies can hit her with their most powerful skills only to see her walk through it all and kill them, then walk away. This is usually the encouraged style of play with Kali, since killing a specified member of the enemy team will grant her a near-full health restore, giving you plenty of incentive to go for the kill with reckless abandon.
• Red from Solatorobo. A recurring characteristic of his is his willingness to see things through to the end, no matter what.
• Doctors Robotnik and Wily from the Sonic the Hedgehog and Mega Man (Classic) series share more than just a PhD in robotics: no matter how many times the heroes stop their plans to take over the world, they keep coming back. Heck, toss Bowser from Super Mario Bros. in and you have a triumvirate.
  • Dr. Robotnik especially has one particularly noteworthy moment in Sonic 3 & Knuckles. Most final bosses in games take you two, maybe three phases and then they're down for the count. By the end of the Death Egg Zone, you first fight a robot vulnerable to flipping gravity and dropping its own spiny carts on it. Then you chase him into a MASSIVE robot where he tries to crush Sonic with his fingers. Destroy those and he chases the hedgehog while shooting flames and firing lasers at him. When this falls and his robot is destroyed, he tries to dart away with the Master Emerald in his classic Eggmobile and you must chase him and defeat him. That's finally it, right? Well, only if you are Tails or didn't get at least the Chaos Emeralds, and it would already qualify him for this trope as it is. If you are Sonic and you got them however, then you get another zone with yet another battle as you chase up to him as Super Sonic while Eggman is in his newest machine and you must guide his missiles back at him to destroy that... leading to YET ANOTHER phase where he is trying to escape with his robot with the Master Emerald and trying to stall you out of Super Sonic. Its only after this phase that the battle truly ends, meaning he put Sonic through six whole phases of a final battle back-to-back just to try to get that Master Emerald! The Doc is many things, but a quitter isn't one of them.
• Sonic the Hedgehog himself is a pretty fair example. Although it's often obscured by his eternal optimism and devil-may-care attitude, it's clear to see that he will never say die. The most notable example of his determination is Sonic and the Black Knight, where it's his will and determination that gives him the strength to hold his ground against the Dark Queen, even after she's beaten him to within an inch of his life.
• This character archetype gets deconstructed in Spec Ops: The Line. Captain Walker's single-minded drive to continue his mission is the reason that a civilian refugee camp gets horrifically massacred with white phosphorus, the better part of the 33rd Infantry gets killed, both of his squadmates Lugo and Adams wind up dead, and the city of Dubai is condemned to death by dehydration due to the water supply getting destroyed. This isn't helped by Walker going insane with intense self-loathing and a need to blame anybody and anything other than himself for things getting worse, to the point of creating his own Big Bad. Sometimes when people tell you to stop, it's better if you actually listen.
• The entire Ur-Quan race in Star Control II. After being forced to conquer the known universe and kill their only friends by their telepathic masters, an Ur-Quan scientist discovered that intense pain causes the telepathic link to shut down, supposedly to prevent their enslavers from experiencing discomfort. He (it?) proceeds to drink enough caustic acid to ensure its own agonizing death and takes the few seconds it bought with its life to broadcast its findings to all the Ur-Quan in range. The self-mutilation that followed bought the Ur-Quan time to develop a device that provided its user with constant border-line unbearable pain without inflicting physical damage. They proceeded to fight an entire interstellar war, constantly in throes of agony. No wonder they want to enslave/destroy the universe.
• There are several in Starcraft and Starcraft 2. Jim Raynor is the most obvious one who refuses to give up on saving Kerrigan and bringing down the Dominion even when logic and good sense says there's no way for him to win.
  • During the course of Starcraft II Legacy Of The Void, Artanis faces constant Breaking Speeches from Amon, The uplifter of his species (the Protoss) who has Mind Controlled a huge part of his Higher-Tech Species via corrupting their species-wide Psychic Link into a Hive Mind with him at the top, and with it shattered the entire religion of the main faction of Protoss. What follows is Artanis soaring through space gathering what allies he can, until he figures out where to find the rest of the the Precursors, whom the Protoss believe to be gods, hoping they can aid him against their uplifter. But no — they're all dead!, and Amon projects a vision of just what he is doing with his Mind Controlled species — using them as Human Resources to create a powerful Host body for him. He then drops Artanis to the ground and unleashes his armies upon him. Artanis's succinct reply after going through what can only be described as the mother of all Trauma Conga Lines? It can only be described as 'Do Not Go Gentle'.
    Artanis: My will is not so easily broken, Amon! The [Protoss] shall fear you no longer!
• Mary from String Tyrant faces a mansion full of monsters and traps all of which threaten to transform her. She never considers giving up and tries her hardest to keep her friends calm.
• Troy from Struggling can be subjected to all sorts of brutal injuries and deaths during his journey, including being impaled by cactus spikes or arrows, crushed by a falling plane, and Eaten Alive by rats. They don't stop him.
• Luca Blight, the main villain of Suikoden II is the embodiment of this trope. Despite being the prince (and later king) of a massive country, he is the single most powerful human warrior on his side of the field (and arguably, the entire Suikoden universe), turning the tides of entire wide scale battles simply by appearing and punishing/killing any of his men for so much as hesitating in battle. If more proof is needed, his death scene should make this trope obvious. This trait, combined with the fact that he is a sadistic Omnicidal Maniac and a Nietzsche Wannabe, makes him a very intimidating and frightening villain.
• SUPERHOT: Deconstructed in the original, reconstructed in MIND CONTROL DELETE:
  • In the original, the System keeps trying to shut the player character out, intimidate them into leaving, and even at one point physically assaults them. The player refuses to back down, passing the System's Secret Test of Character. Unfortunately, that just makes them a prime target for the System's Assimilation Plot. In MIND CONTROL DELETE, they return as the Addict, and it's clear the mindset driving them was an unhealthy one.
  • Avar1ce in MIND CONTROL DELETE starts the game already assimilated, but the sheer force of their greed, their desire for more, is more than the System can keep up with. The System makes an effort to show them the error of their ways, driving them to give up everything they've earned if they want to see how it all ends. This backfires; Avar1ce still finds a way to recover what was deleted. The System gives up and lets them have it.
• Mario himself while we're at it. No matter what the setting, the genre or whether he's alone or with allies, the only real personality traits he has are kindness and simply not stopping.
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story turns Bowser's determination into full-on Heroic Resolve. When put in the role of a protagonist he'll let nothing will stop him from trying to beat up Fawful and getting Peach, not even an Eldritch Abomination taking his form.
    • Beautifully shown with one of Dark Bowser's attacks where he conjures shadowy versions of just about every type of creature in Bowser's army and sics them on the Koopa King. How do you combat this onslaught? By simply trudging forward, stopping every few seconds to block an attack or swat another minion out of your way, because nobody's going to stop you!
    "Listen up! You're saying the kingdom will vanish? NOT TODAY! THIS KINGDOM IS ALL MINE! SO YOU VANISH!
    • Also arguably Fawful. Lost in the first game, got blasted out the castle floating in mid air, apparently survived to run a shop in the sewers, conquered the world a few games later and got destroyed AGAIN to the point he's some kind of dark insect creature. THAT thing then gets destroyed in the final battle, and... it still tries to take Mario and Luigi out in a final attack. Summed up quite nicely in the ending:
    Starlow: What? You're still at it? Look, give up already. Seriously, get over it. You're done with evil.
    Fawful (partly): Fawful will disappear with no troubles. Forever disappearing... WITH YOU!
  • Luigi himself qualifies. While he's become the Lovable Coward in recent games, he never lets that fear stop him from taking on anyone and everyone to save his brother or the Princess. Basically, he goes through the same things Mario does, only he's actually afraid—you know, like a normal person would be.
• Super Cyborg have a couple of bosses who simply refuse to give up, no matter how much damage you inflicted on it.
  • The Flying Jarmai is a giant insect monster who's fought until you explode it's abdomen. But the upper body continues attacking, so you kill it as well, reducing it to a severed head. Who continues attacking with it's Overly-Long Tongue.
  • The Darvograhellix Reprocessing Organism is a boss large enough to take up the entire upper section of the screen, and you kill it by blowing it into two halves. And then both halves continues attacking as two separate entities.
• Axel Almer in Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 2 is absolutely obsessed with defeating Kyosuke Nanbu. The part that makes him a Determinator is that his actual beef is with the Kyosuke Nanbu from Axel's original dimension (he is part of an invasion from another dimension), this Kyosuke is known as "Beowulf" and repeatedly humiliated Axel in battle. The fact that this dimension's Kyosuke has no idea who Axel is or why he is so determined to defeat him doesn't seem to matter to Axel.
  • Original Generations mellows Axel's Determinator personality a little, but he's still intent on stopping Kyosuke. Though he just uses another reason. And when he's Back from the Dead in OG Gaiden and had a Heel–Face Turn, he seems to completely lose his Determinator status... until the Endless Frontier EXCEED where it shows once again: Despite Alfimi telling him to just leave her of getting sucked to a portal along with some slime-like giant monster, and the Soulgain is damaged, Axel will have none of that since he already made up his mind about repaying how Alfimi got him revived. He picks up a blade tonfa and make a jump to save Alfimi (on foot, not with his mecha), assisted with Kouta/Fighter Roar.
    • Also shown in OG Gaiden is probably his method of saving Lamia. Everyone else, even Kyosuke, just seems to be ready to just give up and accept in despair that Lamia will die. Axel? Tells everyone to shut up and just use his dangerous gamble of using Code DTD as a method to restore her, which by the way, has the side effect of any minor misstep will cost her memory. The result is that she is saved. When Axel got into the same situation with sister unit Aschen, not to mention he was being amnesiac at that time, he's still insisting on using it anyway and succeeds.
  • And speaking of Kyosuke Nanbu, whenever something happens to his partner and lover Excellen Browning, he himself becomes a Determinator, plowing through anything in his path to get her back.
  • And, of course, Sanger Zonvolt, despite being easily one of the most competent of the heroes and in a powerful machine to boot often finds himself outmatched, outgunned, and even out and out disabled. His response? "Shut up! And listen! I am Sanger... Sanger Zonvolt! The Sword that Cleaves Evil!"
  • The Sphere of the Standing Archer in the Super Robot Wars Z series is powered by one's determination to keep rising again even after getting beaten down. The inverse is if that his opponent gives up easily, the Sphere loses power.
• Deconstructed in Tales of Symphonia: Part of what made the Knight Templar main villain what he is was that he could not, in any way, manage to give up on his ideals as they became more and more warped and admit that there might be a better way to do it — even as he lies dying, he is unrepentant and claims he would do the same things over again if given the chance to redo his life. This puts the villain in sharp contrast with Lloyd, whose ideals also clash with the way the world works — Lloyd, however, knows to yield and learn from his mistakes when it is obvious that he has done wrong, which is an integral part of the Character Development that turns him into a All-Loving Hero.
• Zagi from Tales of Vesperia. After running into the protagonist Yuri in Zaphias Castle, he mistakes him for Flynn — whom he's trying to kill — and attacks him. After losing, Zagi continues trying to kill Yuri, even though he knows he's not the man he was looking for, because he was "the first man to ever make him bleed". You proceed to fight him 4 more times before the end of the game.
  • Notable catchphrase that he uses during his very first fight with Yuri: "I'll carve your name into my blood!"
  • Note that in his quest to kill Yuri, he goes down with a shinking ship, gets shot out of a giant , trades his arm for a blastia arm, and drinks poison for another weapon against you. In one fight, you can knock him overboard the aforementioned ship mid-battle, and he will immediately, impossibly launch right back onto the ship to keep trying to murder you.
• Probably the crowning example from the Tales series is Milla from Tales of Xillia. Prior to the game, she's never had to eat or even walk long distances - as the Lord of Spirits, her elemental minions did all the work. But as soon as she loses access to them, she learns to fight by herself, walks until she collapses from hunger, and plans to continue her mission even if she has to take on entire empires alone. Later, she's crippled to the point where she can't walk, but she's so determined that if Jude starts to dawdle too much she'll literally crawl away to finish her mission on her own. Damn, girl.
• Try playing a round or two in Team Fortress 2 against a competent and well supported Heavy. Between ungodly amounts of health and a minigun the size of a refrigerator, a good Heavy can just keep plowing through enemies as long as he's got the ammo, and sometimes not even that's necessary. There's even an achievement for the Heavy where he has to absorb every discreet type of damage the game has to offer (bullets, explosives, melee attacks, fire) and still keep going. Another requires the Heavy to survive a crit rocket, one of the most devastating types of Critical Hit in the game that would turn every other class into a confetti of body parts. Yet another demands tanking 1000 points of damage in a single life, or 333% the Heavy's normal HP stock. Definitely a class where pure dogged relentlessness is rewarded.
  • The Soldier's Equalizer allows him to qualify. The less health he has, the more damage he does — at less than 25% health, he can kill a Heavy in a few non-critical hits. Of course, that requires not charging into the Cone of Death.
  • Really, if there is a perpetual back-and-forth stalemate on a Control Point match, chances are both teams are entirely comprised of Determinators. Both teams doing their best to try and win the round, while always downright refusing to back down or give up their points. It gets to the point when the match can end hours later, and only because some players got bored and left, giving the opposing team a chance to attack.
  • Special mention goes to Ms. Pauling in the comics. The entire RED team is getting thrashed by a giant bread monster? Build a time-bomb out of a handy payload cart and Scout's timer! Mann Co. has been taken over by a man bent on finding every last bar of Australium in the world just so he can live forever? Put the entire team back together one by one. Not to mention her resolve to stand by The Administrator's side, even when Gray tells her that whatever she's planning will be worse than his scheming.
• The Ant in The Vision Of The Ant won't be stopped by anything until he got his revenge.
• Time Crisis: Wild Dog is either this or an Implacable Man.
• This trope (along with an utterly brutal Trauma Conga Line) is the engine that drove Lara Croft to make her transformation from innocent and adorable 21-year-old archaeology student to utter badass Adventurer Archaeologist in the Tomb Raider reboot. Nothing that the island of hell known as Yamatai can throw at her — not wolves, not crazed and heavily-armed cultists, not even an immortal queen with command of storms and her army of undead samurai warriors is enough to stop her from making it through alive and saving her friend Sam.
• Fujiwara no Mokou from Touhou Project. She's a normal human apart from the fact she's A. immortal (via resurrection), B. can control fire, and C. fly. Despite her immortality she is as squishy as any other human and feels the pain of her injuries. She is to date the only character to explicitly die on screen in a game. The only thing that stopped her was dying enough times to where the pain was so unbearable she could no longer focus on the task at hand.
  • Marisa also qualifies as well, always pushing herself to be as good as Reimu.
  • There's also Mystia Lorelei who enters the frame as a 2nd level mid-boss and then, when she loses that fight, goes straight on to initiating the end-level fight... Unfortunately, going straight from one fight to another without resting up in-between really isn't a good idea, and no matter how determined and confident you are that you are going to win, you don't actually get physically stronger from that resolve... Mystia is beaten within an inch of her life for refusing to realize and accept that she never stood a chance to begin with.

U-Z

• Nathan Drake of Uncharted fame. The very first scene of Among Thieves is Nate hanging from the end of a train car that's dangling over a freezing cliff in clothes that can not possibly be warm and a bullet in his stomach. He climbs all the way back up despite nearly every part of the train either falling on him or breaking when he tries to use it as a handhold, presumably because every piece really wants to be the one that finally kills the resident Chew Toy. He even notes that it would be easier to let go, but instead he gets all the way back up just so he can trek through miles of freezing snow while hopefully not bleeding to death.
  • Drake's Deception almost makes this the centerpiece of Nate's character. After he's captured and tortured, he breaks out of captivity, beats the crap out of his captors, and, rather than run away, fights through the rest of them to save Sully. When he finds out that Sully isn't even there, he (accidentally) sinks the ship that he's only, barely making it out before dying. He then drifts to shore, barely alive, and manages to find Elena, who tells him that there's a plane getting ready to leave and meet the convoy where he'll find Sully. Despite barely being coherent, he turns around to go find that plane.
    • And to top it all off, Nate then survives for three days in the Rub 'Al Khali desert, despite no supplies, no water and no idea of where he's going, topping it off with a gunfight. The man literally cannot be stopped.
• Undertale is a massive examination of the concept of determination, among other things. The save points throughout the game are points where the protagonist finds something that fills them with determination. This determination allows the player to come back from death over and over again using said save points. It's eventually revealed that only the most determined person in the Underground can do this... and the one the protagonist accidentally booted out is really, really pissed. Eventually, it reaches the point where, if they're killed during the True Final Boss fight, they just get right back up again and continue from where they left off — after shattering into pieces in the usual death animation, the red heart that represents the player's soul pulls itself back together with the message "But it refused." On the boss's final attack, you will be reduced to a ludicrously small portion of a HP without dying. Of course, the protagonist isn't the only one with determination. Flowey and the First Child are also massive determinators with the ability to save, and they, combined with the player on a Genocide run, show that someone with such raw determination can be a very, very terrifying thing if there's no compassion or love behind it, or if said determination is put to the wrong goals.
  • Undyne, leader of the royal guard, staunchly refuses to die if you kill her. She still dies... unless you're doing a genocide run. In fact, she's the only monster you cannot spare, because she's so determined to kill you that she'll fight to the death. To let her live, you have to run instead. Notably, Undyne is the only monster that's able to produce her own determination through sheer force of will. It's how she becomes "Undyne the Undying", that said she'll eventually start melting just like any other Monster filled with determination because their bodies aren't physical matter and thus, can't handle it.
  • The True Lab has a series of journal entries that detail what happens when you inject determination into a monster. They melt instead of dying, and try to fuse with other piles of melting determined-to-live monsters, forming some sort of horrifying amalgamation. Indeed, when Undyne dies, she starts to melt away before turning to dust like monsters are supposed to do when they die.
• The Walking Dead
  • Clementine has clearly learnt a thing or two from Lee in this regard. Probably the best example of this is when she’s bit by a dog and denied medical attention by the cabin survivors, who lock her in a shed for fear of her turning. What does Clem do? She sneaks out, gets the necessary medical supplies she needs for the wound and stitches herself back up.
  I am still. Not. Bitten.
  • Lee Everett in the final chapter of the first season. Being infected, being alone, a street full of about 80 walkers, and having only one arm isn't enough to stop him from rescuing Clementine. Lee makes sure he stays alive until Clem is safe, and can even cut off his infected arm in an effort to buy himself enough time to get her to safety.
  • Minerva in the Final Season. Depending on the player’s choices, she can survive an arrow to the shoulder, two explosions, being shot and to top it all off, in episode 4, “Take Us Back,” she is bitten by walkers, but reappears mere minutes later, still alive and still determined to kill Clementine.
• Wario from pretty much any game he's in (Wario Land or WarioWare). The best examples here are the second and third Wario Land game, where he physically is unable to die in any way. That's it, nothing except the third game's final boss does damage period. Fire just makes him run around and break blocks, zombification doesn't actually kill him and being smashed flat is a beneficial status. Wario World has him go One-Man Army throughout the game from start to finish.
• Boomerang from the first Wild ARMs. He betrayed and hunted his own race simply for the thrill of the hunt, killed one of his (possible) brothers when he saw the humans were more satisfying prey, is betrayed, attacked, and killed by another brother (even though Zeikfried is, at the time, possessed by Mother), and then, simply because his thirst for the hunt hasn't been satisfied (because Zeikfried/Mother interrupted his climactic battle against Rudy, Jack, and Cecilia), he fights his way out of Hell itself so he can finally fight the heroes and have his perfect, final battle.
  Boomerang: Miracles, the humans' belief system that makes the impossible possible. The power that protects Filgaia. Looks like this is the end. Did I lose? No, I did not, I lived the life of a Demon Warrior! I fought and lost my life, I was not defeated, I lived a life of my own dreams. I have lived, I have no regrets, I am a winner. My death is glorious.
• In the Wing Commander series, the Kilrathi embody this trope. In fact, it's established in Wing Commander III that they literally don't know the meaning of the word "surrender" (even those few who are truly well-studied in Terran languages and culture seem to have trouble grasping the concept of it).
• In The Witcher 3 there's a villainous one: Eredith manages to force himself through a storm of untamed magic that's tearing apart Kaer Morhen and causing fatal aneurysms in everyone nearby in an attempt to kidnap Ciri. He gets within grabbing distance of her before succumbing and being saved by Caranthir teleporting him out.
• In Wolfenstein: The New Order, the world has gone to hell in a handbasket. The Nazis used mad super-science to curbstomp the Allies into defeat in 1946, and have spent the past fourteen years establishing control over the rest of the world. The only exception to this is a newspaper cutting which implies that the French Resistance are still fighting on even through twenty years of occupation and are no closer to giving up than they were in 1940.
  • To say nothing of BJ Blazkowicz himself. Coma for 14 years? He wakes up in a matter of seconds to slash a Nazis throat. Getting injected with a tranquilizer that could knock out an elephant? He gets up and stabs the guy who injected you with it in the head. Lose the use of his legs and have major organ damage? Get in a wheelchair and continue the fight.
  Konrad: None of this would have happened if you had just stopped.
• Billotte's Medal in World of Tanks can only be earned by a determinator whose given his enemy a streak of Why Won't You Die? To get it, you have to survive 5 Critical Hits, have, at most, 20% of your health left, get one kill, and survive.
• One of the bosses in World of Warcraft (Golemagg, in Molten Core) involves two giant dogs which are pets of the main boss. If you try to kill them while Golemagg is still alive, the game prints a message saying "Core Rager refuses to die while its master is in trouble!" and they heal back to full health.
  • Holy priests and protection paladins can both become these. Ardent Defender reduces the amount of damage the paladin takes when at low health, and when causes a blow that would otherwise kill them to instead heal them again (this part has a cooldown period). The priest talent Spirit of Redemption allows them to stay on as a ghost after death for a short while. Though they can only cast healing spells in this period, meaning that they're staying on long enough to see other people kill their enemy.
  • The Black Knight. You kill him when he's a mortal man. He returns as a zombie. You kill the zombie, he gets back up as a skeleton. You smash the skeleton, and he's still trying to kill you, with nothing but a ghost remaining. His existence is a tribute to his counterpart from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, of course.
  • Kael'thas Sunstrider. "Tempest Keep was merely a setback!"
• Rex from Xenoblade Chronicles 2 won’t ever give up in a fight. Just as an example, in chapter 3, even after Malos has completely defeated them, Rex refuses to admit defeat, and still draws his sword even when he can barely stand. In something of a subversion though, In chapter 6, they completely lose and Pyra/Mythra are kidnapped. Rex, unable to accept the loss, decides to actually give up. After a pep talk from his friends, however, he returns to being the guy who won’t back out from a fight.
• Daisaku Kuze from Yakuza 0 believes that, even if he is defeated and fails at his goals, he hasn't lost as long as he gets back up for more. To that end, he fights Kiryu a whooping five times despite getting his ass kicked each time.
• You Are Not The Hero has Petula, who will follow the heroes no matter where they go to get back the pendant they stole.
• The main character of Zettai Hero Project is a shining example. Cheerfully called "the weakest main character", he was just an ordinary bystander on the way to some errands when the mantle of The Absolute Victory Unlosing Ranger, the world's most popular super hero was passed on to him. He then proceeds to the Final Boss. Naturally he gets nearly killed. After a bit of training, he does it again. He fails. Repeatedly. He gets mocked, he gets jeered, and nobody believes in him. They call him a loser underdog, they say he looks stupid, and they accuse him of being a fake. But in the face of insurmountable odds, in the face of staggering disbelief, in spite of intense pain and injuries, in spite of the fact that this was forced on to him, he keeps on getting up. He keeps on fighting, getting stronger bit by bit, inch by by painful inch, until he can finally save the world from Darkdeath Evilman. The crushing responsibility of saving 6 billion people rests on his shoulders and he keeps on carrying that weight forward. Too stupid to give up, too stubborn to lose, The Absolute Victory Unlosing Ranger.
  • In fact, we learn later that Main Character's Establishing Character Moment happened when he was just a little kid without any superpowers — he and his sister were kidnapped by a Serial Killer. Despite getting beaten to a near pulp, Main Character just kept standing back up over and over and over again until the police arrived.

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